Not Quite Paradise
by Mikkeneko
Summary: In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Fai/Yuui, Kurogane/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.
1. Part I:  EARTH

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapters will be posted both on my profile and also on her fic journal, which can be found at inmyvortex on Livejournal._

Influences drawn from various space opera dramas, including but not limited to **the Vorkosigan Saga**, **This Alien Shore**, **Firefly**, and **Space Usagi.**

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><p><strong>Part I: EARTH<strong>

_People argued over what event had truly marked the beginning of humankind's domination over space. Some nostalgics pointed as far back as America's manned landing of the moon or even, a little more realistically, the European Union's exploratory post on Mars. But most pragmatic people agreed that these had been mostly dramatic gimmicks; that the colonization of space hadn't really begun until the first manufacturing yard opened on the Lunar surface, and the first automated mining drones began to return from the Belt. Not until people began to built space vehicles in space, rather than fighting against Earth's gravity well to launch them atop humongous rockets, had the dream of space habitation become a reality._

_Only then could the large-scale, self-sufficient stations be built; first on the lunar surface, then the immense, floating fortresses balanced on the LaGrange points in Earth and moon orbit. Terraforming bots were constructed and dispatched to Mars, beginning the centuries-long process of taming the cold planet, but humanity was never that patient; Mars began to sprout sealed domes even faster than Luna had._

_But the true age of space colonization came not with ships or stations, but with something much closer to earth: the construction of the massive, ambitious space elevators that eliminated the need for costly rocket boosts forever. For the first time large-scale transportation of materials, plants, animals and supplies into orbit were made possible; for the first time heavy cargoes of raw materials from the mining drones could be safely sent back. Not science but trade kicked the solar habitation effort into high gear, followed quickly by crowds of curious space tourists._

_And the space elevators made another dream possible, as well. The vast manufacturing yards turned to an even vaster project: immense colony-ships, bound not for Earth's neighbors but for habitable planets discovered in distant solar systems. Within reach at last, the dream of space colonization lured thousands of adventurers from Earth's surface into orbit for barely more than the cost of a plane ticket. Equipped with their own terraformed ecosystems, with armies of robots guarding thousands of souls in deep hibernation, the colony ships set off for the stars._

_It was a one-way trip, of course - the interstellar distances were too vast to ever return, too vast even for communication when a light-speed radio signal could take ten years to make the trip. Once the colony ships were out of sight they were gone forever, people on Earth thought, scattered among the stars to make their own destiny with no way of ever finding them again._

_Or at least, so people thought: until one day a woman in Greece woke up to realize that she could hear voices in her head from her cousins who had departed for Proxima Centauri years ago. _

_Humanity had spent the last century bending and breaking nature to their will and whim; it came to quite a shock to them to discover that nature had made its changes on them, as well._

_Perhaps the migration of humans into space was what triggered it, the vast and cold new environment prompting old mechanisms of adaptation to stir themselves. Perhaps it was the unprecedented exposure to radiation that accelerated the mutation cycle of ten billion human souls giving birth to the next generation. Or perhaps the potential had always been there, hidden in old superstitions and derided at myths. Whatever the source, humans were quick the sense the potential, and to seize upon it._

_The age of space had begun; the age of psionics followed hard on its heels._

_Telepathy was the first talent to be discovered and cultivated. When such vast distances stretched between one human settlement and another that even the speed of light was strained - at best a few minutes or hours, at worst a response time of years - human thought could breach the distances in the blink of an eye. Before long each new colony expedition was fitted with a telepath - or more, if they could spare them - to keep a tenuous thread of contact with the mother planet. Even if no man or ship could cross the vast interstellar distances in time to be of any aid, it made all the difference for the colonists to know that they were not alone._

_The next talent that flourished was telekineses, and it did so for unforeseen reasons. Abilities that would have been scorned as worthless in the gravity well of a planet - why sweat and strain to lift a single spoon off a table surface, after all, when you could just walk over and pick it up? - proved invaluable in environments centering around zero-G. As their cousins the 'paths ignored the laws of space and time, the telekinetic scorned the restrictions of momentum; they could move themselves without needing a solid platform to launch from, or any other item they wished without fearing the backlash of momentum. _

_The potential of the kinetics quickly became apparent. Their unmatchable precision and control in low-gravity environments, combined with the extra force they could add to their strength, made them ideal recruits for the new, close-combat style of melee fighting that the fragile environment of space stations and habitats required; and soon those who had been tools were made into weapons._

_Telepaths and telekinetics were highly sought, by private and public enterprises alike; the demand quickly outstripped the supply. Even with science's best efforts to duplicate and boost the genes responsible, the rapidly expanding infrastructure of space travel and habitation required more. Ethics and morals were soon shunted aside in terms of practical considerations, and rumors - well quashed - circulated about kidnappings, coercion and raids on households for suspected telepaths, forced into work in technological servitude._

_And there were whispers, rumors too, of a third talent - a diamond so rare and valuable it would make the others look like common pebbles. The genetic mutation, almost unheard of, that would allow human pilots to see and manipulate the folds of space itself - who could turn sideways through the fabric of reality and bring a body or a ship across the fathomless light-years of space in the blink of a human eye. Who could do in an instant what the massive colony-ships had taken hundreds, even thousands of years to do, carrying their sleeping human cargoes to new worlds across the stars._

Teleporters_._

_It was only a rumor, of course._

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><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	2. 1:  the path of least resistance

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Fai/Yuui, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Although we are both working on all parts of the story, chapter one was mostly written by Reikah and chapter two was mostly written by me._

* * *

><p>Yuui and Fai were only nine years old and knew nothing of colony ships, or genetic manipulation, or kidnapping and coercion. They only knew that they were hungry and desperate, because their parents didn't quite seem to remember they existed, and stealing could only get them so far.<p>

They found work after a few weeks of searching at one of the smaller more niche space ports in the city, owned by a shady man with an impressive mustache who eyed them both up and down, judged them the right height for decom rats, threw them anti-radiation suits that didn't quite fit properly and promised them both a dollar fifty an hour if they made sure they weren't seen by the health and safety inspectors.

"Done," Fai said immediately, and Yuui echoed him a little reluctantly a half-second later. He couldn't say he was excited about the job, but it did have a lower immediate mortality rate than the job in the abattoir had, and a buck and a half an hour was a buck and a half an hour. "Remember," Fai said to him in the locker room, as they pinned the radiation badges to their chests, "you can't let dad know we're working, he'd take away the money."

"I know," Yuui said quietly. He still remembered the beating he'd gotten over the library book incident, and the things his father had said in his rage. Fai reached over and linked their fingers; his palm was warm and Yuui squeezed it, grateful to have his twin beside him, and then let go in order to do up the suit.

It wasn't as bad as he had thought, initially. Lugging the big heavy canisters across the hangar floor was hard work - he was nine, and underfed; decom rats were usually thirteen or fourteen - but the adults were nice enough in a distant sort of way, and Fai was there to share the weight if it was too heavy. They were sent right into the belly of the spaceships to clean the tiny exterior hatches and chutes, and it was tiring and monotonous but definitely not as scary as clearing the blood and gristle out of the slaughterhouse machines had been, nor as messy.

They worked the full ten hour shift with no sign of those health and safety inspectors they'd been warned about, and even had time for lunch, or would have if they'd been able to afford any. One of the adults even gave them an apple from his, and Fai split it pretty evenly between them; they ate it in the breakroom on the windowsill, pressed close together with their backs to the glass. Fai's left hand held Yuui's right tightly in their laps as they nibbled, and he finished his apple half first. "Tomorrow we can _buy_lunch," Fai said, pleased.

Yuui hummed agreement, popping the last of it into his mouth and licking the juice from his fingers. It tasted wonderful, and it took a tiny sliver off the hunger that had been a part of his life as long as he'd known. "We could get food tonight, too," he added, his thoughts already there as his stomach growled for more, and Fai grinned at him, his eyes blue and brilliant.

"We'll eat out," he said, and Yuui stared at him; that was expensive. They would have thirty dollars, even a bowl of ramen to split cost ten. Fai took his chin in his hand, still sticky with apple juice, and sighed as he ran his thumb along the line of Yuui's jaw. "You need something hot. It's getting colder."

"You were the one who caught pneumonia last year," Yuui said, numbly. In truth he had been planning to put most of their money towards heating and maybe some extra blankets, since the library had banned them after the incident with their father, and he didn't think he could go through Fai's sickness again. He still woke up sometimes crying from nightmares in which he didn't go to their landlady in time and Fai died.

"I know not to do that this time, then," Fai replied dismissively, and Yuui looked away, his throat closing. Fai let his hand drop and instead curled it around Yuui's wrist, the one he still held in his lap. "You're too thin," he said quietly. "It'll be your turn next."

"I can steal food still," Yuui said. "I've - I've been practicing with my luck, see?" He pointed across the room to an empty chair and pushed; it toppled backward, landing on the concrete floor with a bang. The people sitting on either side of it stopped their conversations and looked over their shoulders at it in surprise; one of them got up and pulled it upright, muttering something about its wonky legs.

"Your luck won't stop you from being cold," Fai said urgently, and Yuui swallowed. It was true. He had outgrown his last winter coat - they both had - and the weather was turning ugly. Fai tugged on his hand and Yuui went willingly, letting his twin wrap an arm around his shoulders and press a kiss to his temple. "Thirty dollars a day for two weeks," Fai said, his lips ticklish against Yuui's skin. "Fine. We'll get coats and blankets and put some aside for heating. If you're confident stealing dinner."

"I'm sure I can," Yuui murmured, and might have said more if the klaxon hadn't gone off, signaling them back to work. Fai sighed and jumped off the windowsill, keeping his hand clasped to Yuui's to help him down too. Some of the adults gave them odd looks and it made Yuui feel oddly angry and defensive, like he'd been caught doing something wrong, only he didn't know what it was. Zipping up the front of the suit and grabbing the helmet, he followed Fai back into the hangar.

The second half of their shift seemed a lot longer somehow, and by the time the day was done he was so exhausted he felt like passing out. Fai wasn't much better; even his brother's characteristic flighty nature seemed subdued, and when the space port owner handed them their credit chip payments Fai actually skittered away from him. It was odd enough Yuui questioned it as they stowed their suits in the locker room, checking the radiation badges and relieved to find no change. Fai was leaning heavily against the lockers, his eyes closed, and Yuui checked his twin's temperature by pressing his wrist to his forehead.

"I'm fine," Fai said, slurring slightly. "Just tired. Too many people, I - I'm fine. Just tired."

"That's what you said last time," Yuui replied, allowing a hint of accusation to creep into his tone.

"I'm fine," Fai said dreamily, his eyes sliding shut. "Just tired. Too many people, I - I'm fine. Just tired. Too many people, I -"

"Fai," Yuui said sharply.

"I'm fine. Just tired. Too many people, I -"

"_Fai,_" Yuui said again louder, frightened, and curled his fingers into Fai's shirt, shaking him. Fai jerked in his grip like a doll, but then he opened his eyes and blinked a few times, the litany stopping. Yuui's heart was thudding in his chest.

"Yuui," he said, slowly, like he was remembering. "What's wrong?"

"You," Yuui said shortly, and pressed their heads together. His throat felt dry. They couldn't afford it if Fai fell sick again; last time had been so bad, their dad had been so angry he'd gotten the hospital involved, even though neither him nor mom had been there the whole three days Fai's fever had been eating him up, when he was sweating and crying nonsense words from the sofa that served as their bed. Three days they'd been gone before Yuui finally got scared enough to go looking for an adult to help and found their landlady, who had been the one to call the ambulance even though he told her their father said not to.

The things he'd said and done in his fever sounded scarily like now, but Fai's skin was cool against his; he huffed out a shaky sigh of relief and Fai wound his arms around his shoulders, offering comfort wordlessly. Yuui hugged him back.

They stayed that way until one of their coworkers stuck his head in the locker room and reminded them to hurry and get the fuck out unless they wanted to be locked in, and then Yuui had to let Fai go to finish undressing. His hands shook on the zipper, and he ended up using his luck to help out, tugging on his pants with his mind while he shrugged his shirt on over his head at the same time. Fai stayed leaning on the locker next to him, turning the credit chips over in his hands, admiring them; it was the first time they'd seen any for denominations over five, and they'd thought the five dollar chips were special.

"We'll go through the market on the way home," Fai decided. "There's loads of stalls there we can snatch food from. If you're still up for it?"

"Yeah," Yuui said. He was tired, bone tired, but Fai had decided and he liked to follow, so he would. "What are we going to do with those when we get home?"

"Hide them in the sofa. You know dad never looks under the cushions for his booze money."

"No, but mom does," Yuui said, worried, and Fai snorted.

"She's not gonna be leaving their bedroom for at least a week," he said, holding up the purple twenty dollar chip to the striplight running between the lockers. Yuui finished doing up his pants and buckling the huge belt that kept them on his hips and stamped hastily into his boots. "Her dealer gave her a bag of something, I saw her come in with it."

"You did?"

"You were asleep. I didn't want to get you up just for that," Fai said, with that soft look on his face that made Yuui feel self-conscious and cherished at once.

It was dark outside when they emerged, and cold; the wind was fierce, a living thing trying to get into their thin coats. They walked next to each other, shoulders knocking, arms crossed over their chests. Yuui wanted to go home and curl up on the sofa with Fai, but he needed food, too, desperately, and there was never any at home. What their dad left they had already gnawed on a long time ago, and what edible scraps they could find in the trash had gone the same way.

Yuui remembered the glossy images in the cookbooks he had read, spread out across the library floor, his chin in his palm and his mouth literally watering, his daydreams of a distant time when he might be able to follow those recipes, eat those foods. For now he'd settle for anything hot that might fill his hollow stomach, Fai too. Fai had never approved of those cookbooks, thinking Yuui was torturing himself by looking at them, and Yuui hadn't ever really known how to say that it was a good kind of torture, a wish he had that he hoped one day to achieve.

The market was a bad kind of torture, hot smells of hundreds of different kinds of food ripe on the air. The stallholders eyed them both distrustfully as they entered; they had stolen from here hundreds of times, and the stallholders knew it, and they also knew what their appearance meant. Fai wandered from stall to stall, sniffing the merchandise and giving Yuui quizzical looks.

"Don't even think about it, kid," said the expansive woman behind a stall selling fried and breaded poultry.

"Fuck off, thieves," said the bald man selling hot meat pies.

"I'm watching you two," growled the tall woman selling fresh fruit that didn't look quite so fresh this late at night.

"What did you swipe?" Fai asked as they rounded the corner, and Yuui's eyes flitted above them to the air; Fai held out a hand and a pie landed in it neatly. He grinned triumphantly, tossing it from palm to palm as it cooled. "You're getting really good at the fine control," he said proudly, and Yuui flushed with pleasure at his praise.

They ate the stolen goods together over the river, sitting on the edge of the bridge. The water below them was so dark it was invisible, only the lights of the barges that still floated atop the water giving it definition. The food was hot and sweet in Yuui's mouth, and soothed the rumbling ache of his stomach.

"I don't want to go home," Yuui said abruptly, and Fai glanced at him sharply. "I'm tired, Fai."

"There's a bed back home," Fai pointed out, and Yuui shook his head, unable to articulate what he meant: that he was tired of doing this, of being cold and hungry and scared most of the time. He was nine years old. He saw other nine-year-olds around, occasionally, during the weekend when they weren't in school, and none of them seemed to have lives like his and Fai's. "We can't stay here," Fai said gently, still misunderstanding. "We're getting too big to share a doorway now."

"We're getting too big to share the sofa at home, but we do," Yuui said, and Fai breathed out. Suddenly Yuui was sorry he'd brought it up; it wasn't Fai's fault they were getting too old to beg for food by pulling the waif act on the storekeepers, it wasn't Fai's fault they were outgrowing the sofa they had shared in their natty one-bed apartment since they were born, and Fai couldn't change it. "I'm sorry," he said, and Fai took his hand again, the simple reminder of his presence that normally made Yuui feel better.

"I love you," he said, simple and unreserved, and Yuui turned and buried his face in Fai's shoulder. That at least made him feel better.

* * *

><p>At twenty-standard years old Yuui Flowright wasn't a child by anyone's standards any more; not to drive, not to drink, not to carry a gun. He reminded himself of this sharply as he approached the military base, his heart thumping so hard that he wasn't sure he'd be able to talk past it. This was no backend posting with a token security force, but instead the primary military R&amp;D headquarters of Eurasia's Sector Seven, Earth government. It was locked tight and fiercely guarded around the clock, with some of the best defense systems ever developed.<p>

He'd have to be insane to think of trying to break in. But someone had to do it, and if it wasn't him, who else would?

The guard in the security booth slid his window down when Yuui approached, eyeing him distrustfully; pedestrians very rarely ventured this way. "Government property," he said. "ID or no entry."

"I know," Yuui replied, smiling, and handed over the thin slip of plastic, crowding up close to the booth. The air was cold here, and he wrapped his trench coat around him and held it close with one arm across his chest, his fingers digging into his bicep. The guard gave him a final once over before lifting the ID card to his face and turning his gaze to it; he narrowed his eyes to better decipher the text, at which point Yuui mentally slid his blaster out of its holster and shot him in the throat.

He felt only marginally guilty. Military training at its finest.

He'd taken the cameras out before entry, of course, shattering the lenses with stray flicks of his gift, and although he could have ripped up the steel barrier blocking the road with his mind he preferred not to when the button was right _there_. He leaned through the window as the guard gurgled and choked and died, grabbing the blaster out of the air as he did so, and rammed the butt of the weapon against the gate release button; the obstruction hissed as it retracted smoothly into the wall.

Yuui's fingers flexed around the blaster barrel, and he could feel the adrenaline, antsy tingles in his fingers and toes. He took a deep breath to ground himself, just the one, and then he was moving, loping through the exposed entrance into the heart of the facility itself.

He'd memorized a map of the place before he came, how could he do anything else? He knew exactly how many guards there were, exactly where the cameras were and where each stainless steel corridor led. He knew where his target was. He knew that the complex had been built to withstand everything from a nuclear strike to a biological agent and still keep its inmates safe.

And he also knew he could be in and out in under an hour.

The blaster was a government model, mass-produced and utilitarian; he had three of his own flash grenades to go with it, but they were cheap and unreliable. He'd wanted to keep most of his illegally-earned cash for emergencies, and besides, he'd always known his mind was his strongest asset.

Yuui followed the spiraling corridors, designed to bend and twist back on themselves, and when he encountered humans he killed them. There wasn't much blood; the plasma bolts from the blaster sealed wounds shut even as it made them, but the scent of cooking flesh never would be an appetizing one.

He used up his first flash grenade on the room designated as a break room, ripping the door open with his telekinesis and tossing the small hallucinogenic device in while the inhabitants began to cry out, and when the blinding light went off three seconds later he was prepared. He followed it in, ending the men and women inside quickly and cleanly, one shot each to the head. He was no torturer, not like their employers.

As he went on he found some of his anger beginning to bleed through, and he became rougher and rougher with the complex itself; he tore down a door with such force it hit the steel wall of the corridor and wedged itself there, three tons of metal impaled clean through the wall. Men and women ran to meet him and he threw them across the room too, pinning them there with his teeth gritted not with effort but with rage. His instructors had warned him of this, but it seemed distant and irrelevant, everything they had said drowned out by what they had done.

It was nothing to him to 'catch' the guards' plasma bolts in midair, or redirect them. Their shocked pale faces when they realized what they were dealing with would haunt him later in nightmares, but he had known this going in, and he killed them just the same. He had to.

Someone was waiting for him.

It took him thirty-five minutes to find the room he was looking for, the door barred on the outside and marked with a circular peephole and the words 'Lab 3' stuck just underneath it. His heart hammered as he pressed his palm against the surface, and then he closed his eyes and _pushed_ and the door took its frame and some of the wall with it when it fell inward. It landed with a _boom_that seemed to shake the floor, and the air was filled with dust and the scent of old fear.

His free hand, the one not curled loosely around the blaster, curled into a fist as he looked within, at the shining glint of tools strewn across spotless surfaces, the hum of computers, the things left lying sharp and dormant next to surgical gloves and swabs. Nobody was inside. The great glass wall that neatly bisected the room in two had shattered inward with the impact of the door, but the figure curled in the corner hadn't so much as stirred.

As Yuui looked at him - bent, hurt, thin, frail, stick-like arms wrapped around fragile knees - and his heartbeat picked up even as his palms prickled in anger. Without conscious effort the shards of glass littered across the floor began to vibrate, the cruel sharp implements began to quiver to attention; one of the great strip lights marching across the ceiling exploded, more glass shards raining, harmlessly, to the floor. He forced himself to stop it by breathing out and pushing his power away, forcing it back down. He coaxed a smile to his face, one that felt rusted and alien, and stepped inside; he _shoved_as he did so and the glass slithered out of the way, clearing a path.

He tossed the blaster aside with disdain; he didn't need it now. He crouched down, opposite the pale wasted figure, and resisted the urge to touch. Instead he rested his hands lightly on his knees and said, in the strange half-formed tongue they had made up in their youth, "Hey, you. It's me."

The emaciated creature twitched and stirred, one blue eye looking at him from behind his curtain of tangled hair, and Yuui reached out now, brushing it aside. "It's me," he said again, gently. "Fai."

His twin's lips formed, shaping his name with no sound, and Yuui gently held out a hand, palm up. Fai only looked at it for ten seconds before uncurling one arm from around his knees; instead of taking the hand straight away he touched Yuui's inner elbow, a lost, dazed expression on his face, and then ran his fingers up like a blind man, following the seams of Yuui's coat to his throat and chin and then his face. Yuui didn't blink as Fai traced his lips with the pad of his thumb, the sweep of his cheekbones, the line of his eyebrow. He still didn't hear anything in the way of pursuit.

Fai breathed out shakily, and said in a halting, lost voice, "Sector sixty nine point two zero. Four billion and eight and and and sixty nine point two zero. The colors aren't - I thought I saw - I - I - Sector - I -"

Without thinking Yuui captured his twin's palm, tangling their fingers together, and lifted it to press his lips to Fai's wrist, the pale skin and purple threads of veins so different from the last time they had seen each other. Fai's pupils were a little distorted; his bare wrist was dotted with needle marks. His eyes looked puffy, as though he has been crying recently, and the bags underneath them made him look racoonish in the harsh cell lighting. "Ssssh," he said, and Fai did, staring at him with a wild-eyed pleading expression. His throat worked and Yuui pulled, gently. "Shall we get out of here?" he said.

"Four billion and eight and I - Yuui, _please_," Fai said.

Yuui slid his coat off and wrapped it around Fai's shoulders; Fai was wearing a flimsy hospital-style gown and he shivered helplessly as Yuui helped him into the sleeves, but it seemed more fear than cold. His bare feet were very pink against the shiny gray floor; Yuui went to give him his boots, too, but Fai danced away and Yuui had to push the glass away from the area he moved into. "Fai -"

"No," Fai said, although he was shaking. "I. I need to feel. The ground. Underneath." He wriggled his toes as if for emphasis, and Yuui just nodded. He didn't think he could speak around the lump in his throat anyway.

"Let's go," he said, turning away, and Fai came to him then and pressed close against his side, his forehead bent and touched to the dip of Yuui's shoulder, and fingers buried in Yuui's clothing.

"Please don't let go," he said in a small voice. "It hurts less," and Yuui took his hand and squeezed it, and despite his best efforts there were tears in his eyes, blurring his vision, clouding the world. He had never coped well with Fai being sick.

"I'm here," he whispered, "I'm not going away. I swear, Fai."

"That's - the stars go away when you reach a velocity of - the angle of entry determines the exit velocity and I. I need to get away," Fai said, and his voice was high and breathy, frightened. Yuui nodded slowly, reminded of all that time ago, Fai sick and pale in the hospital bed, his fingers hooked in Yuui's.

"Come on," he said, pulling lightly at his twin's hand, and breathed a sigh of relief when Fai began to move, his bare feet leaving hesitant stumbling footprints in the dust. They had a long way to go, but Yuui squeezed his twin's fingers, pressed against his side.

They didn't see any more guards on their escape, but he stayed by Fai all the way out, supporting his twin toward daylight as he had all his life, and only hoped he could do more.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	3. 2: into the great unknown

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapters will be posted both on my profile and also on hers, which can be found by going through my Favorite Author's section in my profiles. Although we are both working on all parts of the story, chapter one was mostly written by Reikah and chapter two was mostly written by me._

Influences drawn from various space opera dramas, including but not limited to **the Vorkosigan Saga**, **This Alien Shore**, **Firefly**, and **Space Usagi.**

* * *

><p>"Fai," Yuui said carefully, enunciating as slowly and clearly as possible in hopes that his words would get through. "I need you to hold on to me."<p>

They were so close to their destination; so close he could almost taste it, and Yuui wanted to scream. It had been hours since they'd escaped the facility; over an hour since Yuui had finally evaded pursuit and ditched the car with its distinctive military markings into a canal. They'd been on foot since then, and Fai's progress was painfully slow; he limped and staggered in a half-paralyzed crawl when he could move at all, frequently collapsing into a half-catatonic curl. At those times Yuui had had to haul him along by near brute force, and as terrifyingly thin as his brother had become, he never would have managed it if he hadn't been a kinetic. Still, their progress had been agonizingly slow, and Yuui jittered with panic that the authorities would soon find the discarded car and spread out to search the area. They had to get to safety before then, _had to._

As soon as they'd stopped moving Fai had collapsed again, arms flung around his shins and face pressed against his knees as he rocked slightly on the dirty grime of the alleyway. Yuui looked up the sheer face of the building above, frustrated panic warring with hope. They were so close - so close, and he could get them the rest of the way, if only…

Yuui crouched next to his brother, bringing his mouth on a level to Fai's ears, and tried again. "Fai, listen to me," he said a little desperately. "We're not safe here. I need you to get up, put your arms around me, and hold on tight. I have to levi -" He stopped, cutting himself off in frustration. Did Fai even understand?

If words couldn't reach his brother, he'd have to try touch. He reached out and took hold of Fai's hands, gently prizing his clenched fingers away from his arms and folding them in his own. "Fai," he whispered, pulling his brother's hand against his cheek and rubbing gently against it. "Fai. Listen to me."

"Yuui," his brother said, his voice high and thin and strained. "My head hurts."

"I know," Yuui said, latching desperately onto the response. "I'm taking us somewhere safe, where your head won't hurt as badly, but you have to hold onto me now, Fai. You have to hold on tight and not let go, okay?"

For a moment Fai didn't respond, and Yuui despaired, but then with spastic, jerky movements Fai unfolded from his tight curl and reached his arms towards his twin. Exhaling in relief, Yuui pulled him close and then spent a few minutes shifting them around, until Fai was standing pressed against his back, arms locked in a death-grip over his shoulders and around his chest.

Then he began to climb the side of the building.

It was an old, pre-spaceflight building of about ninety stories tall, but that was quite tall enough. Only a kinetic could have done it at all, and it wasn't exactly easy for Yuui either - he had strained his talent to the limit today in the raid of the military base, and Fai's weight nearly doubled his own. He was only glad that the walls were steel, not sheer glass like most other skyscrapers, and so there would be no astonished workers peering out of tall plate windows at them.

He'd had training on this sort of thing, in preparation for his role as part of the space peacekeeping forces; but all his prior motion training had assumed the free-fall or low-grav environments of space. Doing this in full gravity was a hellish strain, and his limbs began to shake with fatigue before he was halfway there. Thank god for Fai's clamp-like grip over his torso, since he never could have held all his weight in one arm. But he kept on going, hauling himself grimly one foot higher and then another, all attention focused on the spot in the wall that was his goal.

Windows in ninety-story skyscrapers weren't meant to open, of course. But a building like this ran a lot of heavy machinery, and all that waste heat had to go somewhere. He was already sweating heavily before he pulled himself up over the heavy plastic lip of the heat vent, its engine roaring noisily in the darkness as it blasted them with hot, foul-smelling air. Despite the heat and the smell he took a moment to rest there, gasping for breath, before he resettled Fai's weight against his back and began to crawl along the shaft.

It took some awkward, claustrophobic belly-slithering, but at last he managed to get to a spot in the air ducts above a room. Peering through the cracks he assured himself that it was dark and deserted, and shoved the ceiling panels aside so that he could let them both down into the empty room.

There wasn't much light; it was an interior room with no windows, and Yuui dared not turn on the electric lights lest some building maintenance man notice. But there was enough light coming from the humming, quiescent machinery to see by, and as his eyes adjusted, Yuui was able to take stock of the situation.

The building was a hospital, of course - Yuui had worked here once upon a time, one of the many odd jobs they'd taken before they'd been sent to the academy. He'd done some checking of the schedule and the floor plan before he left for the base, to ensure that this room was still here - not in use or converted to some other purpose - and unoccupied.

No doubt the authorities would check this place, since it was within their search range. But with so many buildings to check, it wasn't likely they would do more than question the 24 hour security guard in the front lobby and check the security cams on the first floor. After all, how could anyone have gotten to an unoccupied storeroom halfway up the building without going through the lobby?

It took some time to persuade Fai to let go of him - he apparently took the instructions to _hold tight and don't let go_ very seriously. At last he managed to get Fai detached, and curled him up on a low stack of piled mattresses. Yuui's stomach rumbled, and he gave a shaky laugh - there was little chance of finding food around here. "I guess I should have picked a supermarket to break into, shouldn't I?" he said. But medical supplies for Fai had been higher priority.

He did manage to find some lamps that wouldn't trigger any alarms, and turned them on. He began to ransack the room, cracking locks off cabinets to find supplies and medication within. Behind him, Fai's fast, labored breathing gradually slowed, and he was finally able to sit up on his own a bit.

"Yuui," Fai said, clearly but plaintively. "My eyes hurt."

"It's just the light, Fai," Yuui assured him, trying to juggle an armful of slippery bottles and bulky cellophane-wrapped packages. "You'll be all right in a _oh holy shit!"_

As he turned to face Fai the plastic-wrapped bottles went slithering and bouncing everywhere as Yuui stared in horror. Fai was pressing his hands against his face, and blood leaked through his fingers and ran down his cheeks like tears as he rubbed his eyes.

Yuui rushed over and grabbed his hands, pulling them down and away from his face with one hand as his other seized Fai's chin and turned his face into the light. "Don't touch it!" he ordered in a panic. "Fai! What happened? What's wrong?"

"My eyes hurt," Fai whimpered, and as he blinked he squeezed another crimson tear from the corner of his blue eyes to run down along his nose. "They always do… when they always…"

With shaking hands Yuui fumbled for pads of gauze and sterile solution, and began to clean away the blood. At last he found the source of it; discolored flaps of skin covering perfectly round, cleanly punctured circles in the orbit of Fai's eye. There were several of them on each eye; most of them healed over by now, but some still slowly oozing blood. More blood had pooled under the skin, discoloring it and causing the skin around his eye to puff out; in a few days he'd likely have a black eye like he'd been clocked in the face by a baseball.

Yuui took a deep, shaking breath to try to calm himself. He had to be calm, for Fai's sake, he couldn't scream in rage or cry, however much he wanted to. "You'll be all right," he said finally. He held up his fingers in front of Fai's face, two fingers. "You can see all right, can't you? How many fingers?"

"Four billion and twelve and thirty-two point nine five," Fai said and it sounded automatic, like a programmed response. "Two in sector - in sector -" He hid his face against his knees, eyes scrunching shut and squeezing out two final tears of blood. "Yuui, please, don't -"

"Shh, shh. It's all right, I promise I'm not going to do anything bad," Yuui said, and in his heart he was weeping. But he had to be strong for Fai. How could he be? Fai had always been the strong one, the one that Yuui could tuck his arms around and press his face against Fai's shoulder to block out the world. "Look at me, I'm going to clean you up. I'm going to make the pain stop, all right?"

He used some antibiotics and some topical analgesic cream to clean out the wounds, and hunted up some medium-strength painkiller pills. He felt uneasy doing even that - God only knew what drugs those bastards had filled Fai's system with, or how the different medications would react - but he couldn't stand for Fai to be hurting any longer.

Once that was done he checked Fai over the rest of the way. The evidence left behind was small; raw glistening IV tracks on Fai's arms, tiny rings of bruises around his wrists and elbows and knees. There were no broken bones, no severe injuries - no, all the damage done to Fai was on the inside. Yuui was no doctor, but he wasn't a fool - there was only one way that Fai could have picked up wounds like that in the lab.

If you wanted to do surgery on the brain, you had to get through the bone protecting it somehow first. Or instead of making your own holes in the bone, many surgeons preferred to use the ones that were already there; lacroscopic entry through the orbit of the eye was much less damaging and intrusive than cutting open the skull with a hacksaw, no matter how high-tech the drill. Especially if you needed to perform multiple surgeries over an extended period of time.

He felt sick. How many times had they…?

Fai stirred then, his fingertips brushing feather-light over Yuui's wrist, and he looked down to see Fai watching him. His bad eye was already swelling shut. The painkillers he had given Fai weren't surgical quality, but they were potent, and he could see them kicking in as some of the gaunt tension faded from Fai's face.

"I don't want," Fai said, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully, as though he were hammering them into the sentence. "To go. To. Sleep. The colors aren't..."

"There aren't any colors here, Fai," Yuui said gently, peeling his twin's fingers off his arm. "And sleep will be good for you."

"Sleep is good," Fai echoed, then his voice changed. "The changes to brain processing during REM sleep make it a perfect wealth of information." He spoke with an ususual accent, his voice crisp and dictation abnormal even as his eyelids were drooping. Yuui compulsively bent forward and pressed his wrist against Fai's forehead, like they were children checking temperatures again.

"He's not here," he told his twin. "It's okay. I'll be here when you wake up, I promise."

Fai looked at him for a long time, his expression dazed and lost, and then without a word he turned over and lay back on the mattresses.

Yuui straightened up, determined that he'd done the right thing to rescue Fai and get him away from that place. Now he knew that there was no way he could ever let those bastards take Fai back; he had to get them both away from here. He hadn't quite known where to go before - he figured maybe catch a shuttlebus to a different continent, lie low for a bit - but it was clear _here _ was a wider location than he had thought.

But it was also dawning that he was going to have to take the responsibility for keeping them both safe. Yuui realized that a part of him had been hoping, however forlornly, that all he had to do was find Fai and get free and then Fai would take over again, making the plans and the decisions like he always had.

That wasn't going to happen now. Or anytime soon, it looked like. There'd been time since leaving the military base for the main blunt of any tranquilizers or hallucinogens to start to wear off, but Fai wasn't any more coherent now than he had been back in his cell. Whatever was wrong with him was something more subtle, more permanent, and Yuui's stomach dropped like a high-speed elevator as he faced full-on the prospect of trying to hide from the authorities in the company of someone who couldn't even walk unassisted or think clearly.

He picked his way around the hospital storeroom, looking for things that might be useful and trying to come up with some kind of plan.

They'd need money. Money to live on, and to travel, and for medicine and for other things like - like bribes, or things like that. Yuui wasn't sure what kind of job he'd be able to find that paid enough, if Fai wouldn't be able to work. The part-time jobs they'd held as children, while under-the-table enough not to alert the authorities, wouldn't provide nearly enough income.

Of course, he'd been a child then; now he was an adult, and a kinetic to boot. Where could he find a job that called on his special telepathic skills? Most of the jobs for kinetics that he'd heard of were in space, but he couldn't…

Yuui paused midstep, staring off into nothing as his mind raced. Space! If there was anywhere that they'd be able to disappear, to get beyond the reach of the Earth government, where better than another planet entirely? Mars, perhaps - the Lunar colonies were still too close to home. Or maybe a space station even further away. Yuui had never been off-planet themselves, but he'd heard that you could get away with almost anything out there.

He paced around the floor, chewing worriedly at the edge of his fingernail as he tried to figure out this plan. Space was the best plan, for sure. There they could be free of Earth, and he could use his talents to keep them safe. But how to get there? The spaceports were sure to have the tightest security, and Yuui had never even been as far as the Orbit Colonies before, the gargantuan floating metal docks that terminated the Elevators and provided the launching point for the rest of the solar system. Maybe…

Maybe this was a crazy plan. Yuui's first rush of elation faded. He wasn't the bold one, he wasn't clever enough for this. And the thought of space, all that frozen empty voice pressing in around him, made him shudder. Maybe it would be better to try to go to ground somewhere here on Earth. They could travel somewhere far away, lie low, try to scrounge up some money. Maybe Fai would get better…

A low moaning sound startled him out of his reverie, and he turned to see his twin thrashing around on the stack of mattress pads. Fai was whimpering, noises that quickly escalated into a scream, and Yuui rushed to his brother's side as Fai's body convulsed, nearly knocking himself onto the floor.

"No!" he screamed, and Yuui grabbed his shoulders, shaking him to try to bring him awake.

"Fai, it's just a dream!" he said desperately. "It's just a nightmare, wake up!"

"I can't!" Fai gasped, and his eyes flew open, staring right at Yuui but not seeing him. In the dim light the blue color of his eyes were washed out, the irises looking almost opaque. "I can't see them, there's too much, _colors, _there's lines - I, I can't. Crossing. I can't see anything there's too much noise…"

Confused, Yuui glanced around the room. Aside from the background humming of machinery, it was quiet. "You're all right," he tried, unsure what exactly he was supposed to be reassuring Fai about. "It was just a nightmare. It's not real."

"No _it is!_" Fai screamed, his voice loud enough to make Yuui wince. He glanced worriedly at the door. Nobody should come in here, but if people started hearing screaming in an abandoned storage closet…?

"It is real, they _are!_ They _are _but I just can't see them! There's too much… I'm sorry, I'm trying. Please don't… please don't…" Fai's voice ran down in a hiccupping sob, and he sagged against the floor, his hands clenched white around Yuui's arms. "I'm so tired. Just let me rest and then I'll try again, please."

Yuui abandoned words and gathered Fai into his arms, rocking him like a child while he murmured soothing shushing noises. Fai was still crying, choked, exhausted sobs that produced no tears. His limbs were tense as wires, his muscles twitching and jerking in abortive, unconscious movements under Yuui's hands. And Yuui did not know what to do.

Somewhere outside, a siren began to wail.

It didn't mean they'd been found. It probably didn't even have anything to do with them at all. But the sound pushed Yuui over the edge into sheer panic, the state of mind when caution and restraint are cast aside in the desperate struggle for a solution. He cast his gaze wildly around the darkened hospital room, and his eyes fell on the darkened, inert bulk of a triage capsule.

He stilled. _No,_ he thought. _I couldn't…_

It might work. It might let them get into the spaceport, at least, not two crazy men but one man and a piece of luggage. It would at least get them as far as the spaceport docks, where the security was much higher - for there the people and goods were controlled by rigorous customs and security. _And at least it would make him be quiet,_ Yuui thought, and hated himself for it.

Yuui was no doctor, but the pods were built to be used by amateurs - they were adapted colony coldsleep pods, designed to put people into stasis to await treatment if there's too many injured to treat right away. They were meant to be fast, and easy, and safe. Once he had it powered up and turned on, the glowing interface pad told him what to do.

It took much longer to prep Fai, to dress him in the protective antifreeze gel and coax him into the pod. It was hard to say how much Fai understood of what was happening, but he clung to Yuui's hands as he lay down in the padded interior of the capsule, and his eyes had a fever-bright intensity as he stared up into Yuui's.

"No dreams," Yuui told him, smoothing a strand of bright blond hair down against Fai's temple. "I promise." There shouldn't be, anyway - the hibernation system of the triage capsule put the sleeper into something much deeper than REM sleep. He just hoped there was nothing else that could disturb Fai's slumber.

"You'll be there?" Fai breathes, hands tightening on Yuui's until his grip is painful. "You promise?"

"I promise. I promise," Fai repeated. He squeezed back, and from somewhere dredged up a smile. "It'll be just me."

"You won't… they won't… I don't want to…" Fai's speech was breaking down into incoherency again, and bright tears filled his eyes as he bit his lip in an effort to express himself. But Yuui understood.

"No one else, Fai. I promise." Yuui's mouth is dry, and he has to swallow hard before he can say the next words. "You'll wake up to see me, or - or you won't wake up at all."

He felt cold and hurt and shocked in his belly to say it, but he knew it was true. He'd kill Fai before he let anyone take him into that hell again. But Fai smiled, sweetly, brilliantly, and Yuui realized that Fai wanted that too.

"Thank you," he breathed.

Tears blurred Yuui's eyes now too, and he squeezed them shut and stooped down. His lips found Fai's - rough and uneven, bitter with the tang of blood and the antifreeze gel - and he kissed him one last time before he hit the button that would seal Fai into sleep.

* * *

><p>Kurogane walked into the spacer's lounge, a solid glower on his face directed at anyone who dared to glance his way, and his hand hovering suggestively close to the hot katana by his hip. It was hardly necessary - this was Earth space, after all, not out in the wide black where people preyed on the weakest - but it was good to keep up habits.<p>

It was funny, he reflected, how context made all the difference. Here in 'civilized' space there was nothing to fear from the civilians, a meek and petty lot for the most part - it was the cops you had to watch out for, always on the lookout for an opportunity to bust your ass. In the outworlds it was the other way around; you'd get the crazy loners who had been driven to the very fringes of civilization, who'd slit your throat for a handful of yenbucks or shoot you in the back just for wearing a color of shirt they didn't like. By contrast the law enforcement - what there was of it - was usually in the pay of the local station barons. Or, in a handful of rare cases, they were good men genuinely trying to keep some semblance of order in a civilized world, and they wouldn't bother you as long as you didn't rock the boat.

Kurogane had been on both sides of that divide, from time to time.

He preferred the outworlds, of course. Anyone in his line of work would. He didn't normally come this far in-system - close enough to practically buzz Earth's ozone, if he felt like playing chicken with gravity - but he'd gotten an offer for his latest cargo that he couldn't resist. Five hundred grams of high-grade, fresh from the best mines of Titan - and the orbit colonies could pay more, and needed more, than almost anyone else.

Most high-grade fissionable metals were mined in space these days - there was no lack of rocks and metals in the solar system - and mostly used in space, where the demand for energy was huge and there were no handy fossil fuels to waste on it. Despite that the Earth government, greedy as always, held them as some of the most highly-controlled substances in the galaxy. They demanded that all shipments of fissionable materials had to pass through their safety inspection stations - and pay their thirty percent markup tax. Hardly necessary to claim a 'tax' on it when hundreds of grams a year was 'confiscated' by agents as being 'unsafe for human use' - only to turn up a week later heating some rich Earthie's Jacuzzi bathtub!

No, Kurogane had no time to waste on Earth, and no patience for their gluttonous attempt to dominate the solar economy. One hundred percent spacer born - one of the first, his family born and raised in the gigantic Japanese _zaibatsu_ stations that were Mankind's first real extraterrestrial colonies - Earth commanded none of his nostalgia, sympathy, or respect. What was mined in space, used in space, _belonged_ to the spacers, and he wasn't going to pay those greedy Earthers a dime.

Many station businessmen agreed, of course. And that was where people like Kurogane came in.

He had his own ship. That was worth a lot, in today's world. It wasn't a very large ship, just one cylinder around the central core with a crew of three and not much space to spare for on-board cargo. Still, it was a ship, owned free and clear without a debt to anyone, with a drop shuttle for surface landings and half a dozen cargo pods in tow. Even a few kilograms of cargo space could translate to a lot of money, when the cargo was drugs - which Kurogane refused to deal in - or high-grade - which he didn't. And it allowed Kurogane and his two crewmembers to live their lives as they chose.

Still, despite the profit, there was a lot of risk in coming this far in-system. Risk that something would flag him, draw the federal shipping police down on him. Risk every time he dealt with his local contacts, that they would decide the risk was greater than the profit, and turn him in to cover their own asses. Kurogane had needed to play some pretty risky high-velocity tag and shoot with some sharks on his way in with this cargo, and he itched to be out and away.

He reined in his impatience. A successful businessman didn't let vague shadows spook him, and fuel wasn't cheap. He had to take on some kind of cargo to make his next trip worth it, or he'd be bleeding money every kilometer he went.

It was always harder to find cargoes going out of Earth space than coming in. The two biggest exports to the outer colonies were drugs and slaves, both of which Kurogane refused to touch. And anything even remotely organic was hounded by the feds like fucking watchdogs.

Still, there had to be _something._ He slid into a corner table by the back of the port bar, where he could keep his back to the wall and keep an eye on the door and large plate window. He tapped his order into the pad in the center of the table - showoff, frivolous Earth - and caught the bartender's eye as his order flashed up at the center bar.

Touya nodded at him just slightly, and turned back to the rest of the bar. Touya was one of his best contacts on the spaceports; for all that he lived in Earth's shadow, he had no love for the central government. And in his line of work, he met a lot of people, traveling through on business or pleasure or… for other reasons. If there was anyone here tonight who might have some business for Kurogane, Touya would send them his way.

His drink rose up from the center of the table - gold whiskey with just a splash of tonic - and for a moment Kurogane devoted to it the full attention he deserved. On this, he thought grudgingly, Earth had the advantage; no hydroponic recycle center or greenhouse could turn out alcohol quite like old Earth.

When he looked up again from his glass, Touya was leaning over the bar and talking to a man. Kurogane's eyes widened, then narrowed as he took in just what _kind_ of man. He had 'Earther' written all over him - his clothes, his stance, his bearing - but his skin was as fair as though he'd never seen the sun. He looked awkward and out of place. What would a man like that be doing on the outgoing side of the space docks?

Touya nodded over the man's shoulder in the direction of his corner, and the stranger turned around and stared at his table. His eyes crossed Kurogane's with a jolt that the bigger man felt almost as a physical blow.

"This seat taken?" the stranger asked brightly, and Kurogane took an instant dislike to his cheerful tone. He wasn't a morning person at the best of times, but it wasn't just that; given the tension around his mouth and the wild look in his eyes, the chipper façade grated like a hacksaw on a violin.

If this guy was really a customer, then it wouldn't do to tell him to fuck off. He gave a noncommittal grunt instead; the man plopped down and smiled brilliantly across the table at him.

"What d'you want," he said, after polishing off another swallow of whiskey. He couldn't allow himself to get too drunk but damn, he missed good alcohol in the outworlds.

"My, you're a friendly one, aren't you?" the stranger laughed. Then his smile faded slightly; he put his elbows on the table and laced his hands together, and leaned forward slightly. "I need to transport some… unusual cargo."

"Unusual," Kurogane drawled. Something prompted him to mess with the guy's head a little. "Nothing illegal or anything like that, I hope."

A brief flash of dismay sparked in the man's eyes, but he kept on smiling. "No, of course not," he said after a brief pause. "It just requires some… special handling. I would have a lot of trouble getting it through customs; they don't really have the facilities to handle it. I hoped that you could help me."

"Maybe," Kurogane allowed, letting business push aside his initial irritation with this joker. "I have a ship. It'll cost you, though; specialized cargo runs aren't cheap. You can pay?"

"I have a little money put by," the stranger said. His fingers worked restlessly, dragging through the moisture left on the tabletop and fiddling with a napkin. He turned the flimsy paper around and pushed it across the table towards Kurogane. The smuggler's eyes fell to it; faintly traced lines spelled out _500,000._

That was a hefty price. Kurogane was intrigued despite himself, and even as he braced himself for suspicion, he knew he'd do it. "Where to?" he asked, as he passed his glass over the napkin, smearing the numbers into obscurity.

"Where are you going?" the stranger countered.

Kurogane narrowed a glare at his potential client; what was the man playing at? "Europa," he said at last, naming one of the furthest and most desolate of the Solar colonies, a true backwater town millions of kilometers from anything.

"What a surprise, that's where I'm going too," the man said cheerily.

Kurogane rolled his eyes. Fine; if this idiot wanted to play silly buggers, he was game. "This cargo. What's its dimensions?" he asked.

"Two point five cubic meters by one," his customer replied. "Three hundred kilos, give or take a few."

"How many?"

"Just one," the man said quickly.

One? It didn't sound like much, but in sufficiently expensive cargo, that could mean a lot of profit. "Fine," he said guardedly. "I've got a dozen cargo pods. We can stow -"

"No!" the blond man said hurriedly, and for the first time in this conversation the strain behind his cheery façade flashed through. "No cargo pods. I want it stowed with me, on the ship."

"On-ship?" Kurogane's bullshit alarms began to go off in the back of his head, and he began to rethink this deal. "This isn't a cruise liner. There's hardly room for you to bunk, let alone take a carton of that dimension with you on board."

"It goes with me," the man repeated stubbornly. "Or no deal."

Kurogane stared at him for a long moment, trying to figure out what was going on here. His initial worry, that this weirdo was some sort of sting or plant, was fading; he looked way too agitated and was behaving too strangely for that. But what in the hell else could it be? Half a million yenbucks was a lot of money. "Radioactive?" he said at last.

"Definitely not," the client said firmly. "Just - fragile. I don't trust it out of my sight."

Kurogane broke one of his rules of business, then; despite the unsecured venue he leaned forward until he and the stranger were breathing the same air, and growled softly "Just what the hell is in this carton?"

The man glared back at him, his blue eyes surprisingly icy. "I was assured that you would be discreet and confidential. What's my cargo is none of your business."

"I'm plenty discreet," Kurogane snorted, wondering what the hell Touya had told him. "But I'm not stupid, and I'm not suicidal. Whatever you're mixed up with, it stinks."

"I can find another shipper," the stranger said icily, starting to stand from the table.

"Can you?" Kurogane challenged him.

A silence hovered over the table between them. For a moment his expression was unguarded; painfully vulnerable, dangerously scared. His eyes darted around the room, and Kurogane could almost read his thoughts; who else can I trust? Will I be able to find someone else before it's too late?

Kurogane finished the last of his drink. "Look," he said. "I don't owe anything to Earth, or any Earthie government. Whatever it is, I sure as hell won't report you or turn you in for it. But my ship means my rules. I want to know what I'm getting myself into, or there's no deal."

"I -" The man broke off mid-sentence, and sat down again, staring at the tabletop. He looked at the shining surface and swallowed audibly. "I'll tell you once we're underway," he said in a barely audible voice. "Once it's safe. Not before then."

"All right then," Kurogane said, and felt a last spur of foreboding as he sealed the contract. "It's a deal. Got proof of credit?"

In silence the stranger - his new client - brought out a computer chip and handed it to him. Kurogane raised his eyebrows in surprise as he popped it into his pocket reader to shoot a quick query back to his ship. This guy really was an idiot, or at least painfully naïve; if he'd wanted to Kurogane could have stripped the account of its funds right then and there, before ditching his new passenger in space.

The promised money was there, under an obviously fake name. Kurogane waited for the all-clear to come through, then handed the chip back, unaltered. "All right," he said. "My ship can be ready to leave by 2300 tonight. Meet me by the south lockers with your cargo and we'll get loaded."

A look of undisguised relief flashed over his new passenger's face, and he scrambled to his feet. "I'll be there," he promised.

Kurogane regretfully abandoned the idea of another drink and unfolded from his corner table, nodding to Touya as he started to pick his way through the tabled.

"Ah - don't you want to know my name?" the blond man asked as Kurogane pushed past him.

"Not really," Kurogane tossed over his shoulder as he left the bar.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	4. 3: now you're on your own

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapters will be posted both on my profile and also on hers, which can be found by going through my Favorite Author's section in my profiles. Chapter 3 was primarily written by Reikah._

* * *

><p>Yuui had always been a lighter sleeper than Fai, and he awoke shortly before dawn to the sound of keys in the lock. His eyes still stung with sleep; they had only gotten back from work a few hours ago, and he was tired all the way through.<p>

At twelve he and Fai had grown too tall for decontamination work, but the man who owned that space port had a brother who ran animal bloodsport rings and he could always use a hand cleaning up afterward, and so they had, more or less, passed from one job directly to another. It paid slightly worse, but hauling dead animals around was less physically demanding than lugging the washer equipment around in an anti-radiation suit had been, and any money was good money as far as the twins were concerned. It was worth the occasional scratch or bite from the larger species, although both of them had gotten very good at separating combatants painlessly.

The door creaked open gently, meaning it was their mother returning rather than their father. Fai stirred lightly in his sleep but didn't wake up, nuzzling closer. They had grown too large to lie back on the sofa at the same time and were pressed close together, chest to chest. Fai's hair tickled Yuui's cheek and nose, and his arm was heavy over Yuui's waist; he insisted on sleeping on the outside lip of the sofa, and the blanket didn't wholly cover him, so he tended to curl up next to Yuui to try and leech his warmth. Yuui didn't mind at all. He narrowed his eyes against the light flooding in from the hallway and waited for his mother to go into the bedroom with the usual series of crashes and bangs as she bounced off the furniture on the way.

Instead she moved from the door to the sofa, her steps slow and cautious. She didn't trip or hold on to things to keep her steady and Yuui wondered if she was actually _sober_. She knelt down on the floor next to them, her eyes level with his; her face was masked in shadow and Yuui tensed a little, involuntarily. She hadn't done this for a while. It had been an old habit of hers, when they were smaller, to sit next to them and talk to them when they slept.

Sometimes she said she hated them, and blamed them for how they had ruined her life and their father's; sometimes she said she loved them and apologized, petting whichever twin happened to be closest as she talked. Yuui had lain awake but pretending sleep for each confession, hoping it would be one of the latter and that it would be his hair she stroked. If Fai knew what she did he didn't say anything; Fai was still pretty vocal about his disdain for both their parents.

She smelled like alcohol and cigarette smoke and her blue eyes were circled with dark bags; Yuui didn't need light to know her pupils were gone. He watched her in silence, frowning. She was swaying slightly; chrysameth again, that stuff always fucked her up. She had a bottle of something that smelled strong in one hand; she reached forward with the other and it shook slightly as she thumbed some of Yuui's hair out of his eye. Her nails were sharp across his cheek.

"Poor babies," she said hoarsely, and Yuui relaxed his grip on Fai: it would be a contrite speech tonight. "Look at you two," she continued, her fingers carding through his hair. Fai's eyes opened, thin crescents of blue, and Yuui squeezed his twin's arm to signal that he shouldn't move. Their mother sighed and sat back, bringing one hand up to rub over her face. It didn't improve matters.

"You're so pretty," she said dreamily, taking a swig from the bottle. "I was once pretty too, you know. I _was_. Before they sent me to that fucking space prison."

Fai's mouth moved in the darkness, shaping the words: _ignore her. Go to sleep._Yuui shook his head involuntarily, and his twin's mouth turned downward, the corners curling in a scowl that didn't suit him.

"I showed them, though, I did. I came back," their mother said, earnestly. She paused her rant to take a swig from the bottle, and Yuui raised his head to show her he was awake and listening. She smiled at him, softly, like she had when they were very small and she hadn't yet discovered the lure of chrysameth, just marijuana-derivatives.

She used to sit at the table with them, teaching them to read and to write, telling them tall fables; she loved books and stories. Later there had been the public library, particularly during the winter when the apartment was unheated. After a while she had left them at the library and gone away, reminding them to stay there until she returned, but by the time they were about seven she kept forgetting to come pick them up when the library closed. On one occasion they had been waiting for her for nearly four hours, cuddled close together on the steps outside, their breath fogging in the air, before Fai had enough and they made their nervous way home together.

After that it was difficult to trust her, not when Fai was so much more reliable.

"I'm sorry I had you," she continued. "I just wish I were _better_. You were a mistake, I should never have - oh, it doesn't matter, does it? I just. I didn't mean to put you through this, baby," and Fai sighed softly and closed his eyes, pointedly tuning her out. Yuui couldn't, though. He'd heard this rant before, of course; he had grown up knowing he and Fai had been unwanted and unwelcome but tolerated. It hurt, of course, but not as much as it could have; Fai loved him and he loved Fai and that was okay.

"At least your dad was okay. He's hidden us well, hasn't he?" The liquid in the bottle gurgled as she gulped it down, and Yuui frowned; even he knew you weren't supposed to mix chrysameth and alcohol. "It's not his fault I see... colors, I see them all, and... no."

Fai tensed under Yuui's hands, drawing his attention. His eyes were open again; Yuui leaned forward and nuzzled curiously at Fai's throat, hoping to distract him. It had gotten that way, lately; sometimes they'd touch each other and their bodies would respond in new, strange ways they didn't know how to deal with yet. From the pink tinge that grew across Fai's cheeks and the way he tipped his head back just a little, Yuui figured it had worked.

"At least you have each other," said their mother, quietly, and Yuui realized she was watching them. He drew away from Fai, feeling his own face heat up, and there was an odd feeling in his stomach like butterflies that could be nerves or excitement or guilt. It seemed he wasn't allowed to touch Fai in public now without people looking at them, and he always felt the same way; guilty, and unsure as to why.

"I'm sorry I did that to you," said their mother, folding her arms across her chest. In the strange half-light Yuui could see Fai in her, which he supposed meant he could see himself. It was strange, disconcerting. She was still watching them closely. "I made you like that on purpose, you know. Took away your friends. But it was better than having the other kids rat you out, I promise." She sighed. "I don't even know why I'm saying this, I... I just. Need to tell someone. I took so much crystal, I can't see the colors..."

Fai looked puzzled, and Yuui knew the feeling. What other friends? They'd never been allowed to play with the neighborhood children, and now they were too old for 'friends'. Fai took his wrist quietly, allowing his thumb to rub back and forth over the thin skin there, and Yuui squeezed his shoulder, plucking up his courage.

"I don't understand," he said, his voice small and hoarse and stupid.

"You don't have to understand," she said, listing to the left. "Just smile. People will do so much more for you if you _smile_, baby. Most of them don't even know it's a lie. Your dad did, maybe that's why he stuck... I don't know." She raised the bottle again and took another long chug, and when she lowered it the level of the liquor inside had decreased sharply. Her speech, which had already been slurred, was drooping. "Smiling makes people not look at you. It's useful."

There was old pain in her voice and Yuui felt sad for her, abruptly. Fai was so warm against his side, and she had never had her own Fai. He couldn't imagine life without his twin. Perhaps that was what the alcohol and chrysameth were to her: replacement for a twin she had never had.

Perhaps he and Fai should have tried harder, loved her more, tried harder to fill that void in her. Maybe then she wouldn't have spent so much time running away from them, abandoning them in public libraries so she could go out and do whatever it was she did. Carefully, his face feeling stiff and alien in this strange setting before this strange woman who had made him, he coaxed the corners of his mouth upward in a stiff smile that stretched his cheeks and felt wrong, and turned it on her.

She lowered her bottle and smiled back, an expression scarily like the one Fai wore when he was happy. Was this where it had come from? Was Fai lying when he smiled? The thought worried him, and he inched a little closer to his twin, who watched him with a displeased expression.

"That's it," she said slowly, like she was trying to soothe a frightened animal. "You're so pretty when you smile, honey. Which one are you?"

Fai twitched under Yuui's fingers and Yuui felt the smile dropping from his face, the sudden reminder of her carelessness somehow surprising even after a lifetime of it. Fai stirred, lifting his head and tilting his cheek just enough to let her see his expression, which from the way she flinched must have been cold. Yuui rubbed his thumb over the skin of Fai's arms, heartsick. He had - he had hoped... "Yuui," he whispered. "I'm _Yuui_."

"You should know that," Fai said coldly. Yuui dipped his face and pressed his forehead against Fai's shoulder blade as his twin twisted and sat up, throwing his legs off the edge of the sofa and glaring down at their mother. "We might be twins, but we're not the _same_."

"I'm sorry," their mother said, and she sounded it.

"Yeah. We know," Fai replied, and there was an ugly kind of venom in his voice. Yuui sighed and closed his eyes. "You're always sorry, but you never change."

"I have to do... this," she told him, holding up her drink. "Otherwise the colors... oh, the colors, they -"

"I don't care about the colors," Fai interrupted. "We're trying to sleep. Leave my Yu - leave us alone."

"Fai," Yuui said softly. Her face was so sad.

"No," Fai said. "You're always making up excuses for her. Go to sleep."

"I'm sorry," she said, and she looked like she was going to cry. Yuui wanted to go to her, but at the same time, he knew Fai was right. He glanced back and forth between them, and then Fai turned to look back at him, and he didn't look that much happier than their mother. Fai always tried so hard to be big and tough and emotionless, and Yuui quietly put his arms around his brother, guided him back down to the sofa. If he could only comfort one, it would never be a fair competition between them.

At some point their mother must have gone to bed, but he didn't see her go, and couldn't have said if it was before he went to sleep, when he was running his hands over Fai's bare skin to soothe him, or after.

* * *

><p>It had been easy enough to smuggle himself onto the space elevator; forged documents could be purchased on street corners and Yuui still had some funds left over from paying for their escape route. He'd simply bribed a guard to slip past security, and tried to walk as though he owned the place, unconsciously mimicking Fai's cheery confidence which had formed so many memories of his early childhood before the research facility had torn him apart. It was harder than it looked. His heart had been pounding in his chest, caught between fear of discovery and of leaving Fai alone, unprotected, in the hospital storage room.<p>

They would not be merciful to either of them, he knew that already. Fai was important to the government in a way he didn't understand, although his instructor at the academy had tried to explain after they took Fai away for the first time. Yuui's telekinesis had made him valuable, even though he had never let on how powerful his gift truly was, but they would know by now and know too that he was a threat as long as he lived. Despite this he had plucked up his nerve and headed to the spacer's lounge, where the man who sold him the forged IDs had indicated he could find spacers more adept at going unnoticed, and he was grateful now he had found the captain.

Smugglers hadn't even been his first thought, he mused as he rode the elevator back down to Earth, pointedly not looking out of the windows. He had never been afraid of heights but space was something else entirely. He didn't know whether he could trust the gruff spacer, although he doubted it; they had both learned early on, he and Fai, that people were duplicitous and cruel, sometimes thoughtless. Smugglers liked only money; he had never met any inter-solar criminals before, but he had known plenty of earth-bound ones growing up, since criminals were the best source of employment for two hungry little boys who weren't quite street rats. He would have to find more money somehow, in case the smuggler turned on them midflight.

It would take months to reach Europa, what with the shortage of light speed, and he was okay with that. If he could... maybe he could unfreeze Fai, keep him safe in their quarters, begin solving the mess they'd made of him? At the academy he had studied the psychology of pain in case he needed to torture someone, to his distaste, and although much of what he knew was expressly _not_ applicable he hoped by repetition he might be able to help. He wanted... he _needed_Fai to come back to himself, if he were honest. He hadn't been doing so great since they took Fai away from him, despite his instructor, Ashura's, best efforts.

If he could maybe work with Fai during the flight, sneaking him food and drink... space would be the perfect thing for him, no outside stimulus to distract or hinder his progress, nothing but time. It used to be that all he needed to do to bring Fai back to himself was kiss him, but Yuui had no illusions about fixing whatever had been done to his twin with the power of his love, no matter how much he wished that were possible. He had been in love with his twin for as long as he could remember; if that was all it took Fai would be back to normal by now.

Once he got to Europa he could change things up a bit. Europa was a domed colony rather than a terraformed one, too far away from the sun for terraforming to help; he knew it was a lawless place from the accounts he had read at the academy, but Earth as always was too selfish to spare its elite kinetic peacekeepers to help the local dome owners and so they had their own, rather corrupt police force. Mostly they were mining colonies, and poor at that thanks to Earth taxes, but they had their share of sophistication. If he could find work there, perhaps for a dome owner, he could buy cosmetic surgery for Fai, or pay for him to be seen by mental health professionals.

Of course, all of this navel-gazing wouldn't help him if he couldn't even get the cryo-capsule through space dock security, he thought as he exited the Earth-side elevator base, emerging blinking into natural sunlight. The south locker area itself wasn't too heavily secured - no doubt the reason why the smuggler captain had docked there - but Yuui would still have to get the capsule through two or three security checkpoints to reach it.

He shouldered his bag and paused, then; a group of elevator maintenance workmen in orange jumpsuits were standing clustered outside the building, smoking. One of them brought back memories for him of his time working at the space port back in Hong Kong, where he'd been raised; a young figure, much too young to be eighteen, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth and his overalls half-undone to reveal a worn t-shirt with a cartoon logo...

A decontamination cleaner, or decom rat. Of course. He could have cried with joy; instead he covered his mouth with his hand to hide his grin and made his way down the steps towards the ranks to autocabs lined up for passengers. He slid into the back seat and gave the AI behind the wheel directions to the street where he had purchased his forged ID.

_Not long to go,_he thought, letting his cheek fall against the glass, and he wasn't sure whether he meant until their escape or until he could decant his twin, curl up against Fai's side in the dark. It had been too long, and he knew he was being selfish and shallow, dreaming of comfort when Fai was the damaged one, but...

God, but he missed his brother.

The autocab dropped him off at the mouth of a street in the dingier part of town, and he fed it a chip and told it to wait. It lit up and informed him for the amount he'd given it it would wait for an estimated "Six hundred and seventy two hours," and he assured it he wouldn't be that long.

Saiga owned a shady electronics shop at the far end of the road. It never sold anything worth a damn, mostly unwanted debris - discarded virtua television sets, hologoggles with one lens missing, second-hand cooking equipment with broken buttons, computer flat-screens with the glass cracked and gaping open. Yuui doubted he ever shifted any of his stock, but then again, he didn't need to. When Yuui pushed open the door there were a few other people in the shop, a couple of teenagers wearing far too much make-up, not enough clothing and the punched out eyes of hydrameth users, the new clean face of chrysameth. Cut with peyote, the dealers said, but if anyone believed that they were too fucking stupid even for illegal drugs.

Yuui hid behind a stack of broken microwaves, their doors gaping open and their AIs making their clocks blink at him eagerly, like puppies wagging their tails in hopes of enticing him to play. It was built into them, the need to be useful, to be loved. He'd heard that one of the far-distant colonies was studying AIs, but even the closest colony from the Sol system was a hundred years away by cold sleep, so no matter how innovative they got their tech would still be outdated by the time it arrived. He watched the teenagers curiously through the frosted glass of an open door, and didn't move until they'd left.

"What can I do for you now?" Saiga asked when Yuui approached. He was reclining behind his desk, a proper old-school pipe in the corner of his mouth. His eyes were inscrutable behind the dark sunglasses he always wore. A little television set, one of the older models with 3d, was running beside him although the sound was muted. "Did the ID not work out?"

"No, it worked fine," Yuui said. "But I need something else. I have some... cargo, I need to move. It's hidden in a hospital for now."

"Live cargo?" asked Saiga calmly, thumbing some noxious substance into the bowl of his pipe.

"Kind of. It's cryo frozen."

"I see." The proprietor groped for one of the drawers on his side of the desk, pulling it open to reveal an old-fashioned book of matches. Yuui shifted nervously. Everything about this guy was old-fashioned; Fai and he used to use his services for forged documents before they went to the academy, papers claiming they were older than they were so they could get adult jobs. Saiga lit up a match and carefully applied it to whatever he was planning to smoke, both hands shielding the small flame as though there were any kind of wind within his shop. As he did this he said, around the pipe, "What do you have?"

"This," Yuui said, digging in the back pocket of his pants for one of the credit chips he'd lifted from the armored car. It wasn't the one he'd given Kurogane; this cash hadn't been laundered. "It's dirty money," he said, handing it over. He expected he'd have to pay more to compensate this guy for having to have it cleaned, and for yet another moment he wished he were smart when it came to money, smart like Fai. He had no idea how much was acceptable.

Saiga took it and held it carefully between two fingers, sucking at his pipe. "I can get you things to get you out of this hospital," he said. "And even to disguise you. Getting this cryo unit into the space docks may be harder than you think."

"It will?" Yuui asked, warily, shifting his stance. He didn't have any real weapon, but some of the drawers in the hospital had contained wrapped up surgical implements. He had a scalpel tucked into his back pocket.

In response the forger turned his television set slightly to face Yuui, showing him a poker-faced female news anchor. She held actual paper in her hands, as though she were reading what she were about to say off hardcopy like way back pre-silicon age. His academy picture was displayed on the screen behind her, cut out from the group photo and enlarged a half-dozen times. The ticker running across the bottom of the screen warned the public not to approach him, as he was the terrorist mastermind behind the graduation day shuttle bombing that had killed three hundred and six.

_That's a lie,_Yuui thought, angrily. There had been no bombs involved, just an unmanned fuel drone, which he had dragged out of the sky and into the academy grounds to act as his decoy during his escape. He hadn't accounted for the size of the explosion, sure, but three hundred and six? He didn't think his body count was really in the triple digits, not even counting all the guards he had killed in Fai's prison. He could feel Saiga's eyes on him, though.

"What an uncanny likeness," he said aloud. "What a misfortune that I should resemble a mass murderer." He pulled out another chip and wordlessly handed it over, meeting the forger's eyes; he just puffed at his pipe, his eyes half-lidded. Yuui could feel the stabbing pressure behind his eye that indicated his power was acting up, and the grimy lampshade above their heads began swinging slowly back and forth, the light changing before them.

"Two hundred thousand," said Saiga, quietly. "I can get you your forged IDs, your disguises, other stuff too. Things for your trip. Clothes. Dye, for that hair of yours. Travel permits. Things the slavers use, since they take cargo around in much the same way. These things are necessary, my friend. Two hundred grand is a small sum."

"Yes," said Yuui tightly. "It is. I'm sure the feds would pay more, if they heard someone who looks a little like their missing terrorist was here."

Saiga blew smoke through his nose as he tipped his head and laughed, and some of the pressure inside Yuui's skull ebbed away as he stared at the man in bewilderment. "What?" he said. "What is it?"

"I see you have never encountered the feds before, my young comrade," said the man, grinning. "I go to them, I say, 'I have found your man'. They come and arrest you, or shoot you in the head, I suppose, since you are dangerous. I say, 'what about my money?'"

"... And they say be grateful we're not shooting you too for aiding and abetting, and take away what I paid you," Yuui finished. It was a familiar story.

"Exactly," said Saiga. "And then all my customers stop buying from me, in case I tell the authorities. I will end up no richer, and much poorer. I am not stupid. Just greedy. Two hundred thousand and you will have your escape route."

"I'll need a government ID," said Yuui slowly. "And a Department of Work badge."

"Like a health inspector? Why?"

"That would be telling," Yuui replied, in a sing-song voice, and the man snorted. "I need it all within the hour."

"Will you be waiting or coming back later to collect?" asked the forger dryly, and Yuui gave him his blank, heavy-lidded liar's smile, his mother's smile.

"What do you think," he said.

* * *

><p>The ship was quiet upon on his return, which definitely wasn't normal. Kurogane ducked his head to get through the airlock door, wondering where the hell his crew had gotten to; usually they would be here to greet him, wanting information on the world or any potential jobs he might have acquired. For them to be absent indicated something was wrong, and Kurogane thought he knew what.<p>

He nodded quietly to himself when he checked the stilled circular engine room, its walls crisscrossed with the railings his engineer used to move about the towering machine in zero-grav, all silent and unmoving. It was rare for the engine not to be running, even while docked; it provided their air as well as other things, like electricity. The only reason for it to be still was that it needed repairs of some sort, which made this not his day. They had twelve hours to get ready and go.

Sure enough there was a ladder stamped with the dock insignia pushed against the cylinder on the opposite side of the door. A shiny steel hatch had been cracked open and wires spilled out; Kurogane narrowed his eyes to see if anything was missing, and thought there might be. A half-empty coffee cup sat on the ground next to the ladder's feet, along with the toolbox and a pair of working gloves and a coil of spare wiring, and Kurogane sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

He should have known this would happen. Even though she had told him she was fine, he shouldn't have taken her at her word.

He backed out of the engine room and made his way up through the ship, past the cabins - four, but the guest cabin was far too cramped and small to accommodate that blond earthling's box, he'd have to think of something - to the bridge. Sure enough, his engineer was in there with his pilot; they were sitting quietly on the steps leading down to the flight console, Syaoran's arm over Sakura's shoulder. Her face was turned toward him and her eyes were puffy and red; Syaoran looked genuinely concerned, which just went to figure. Most pilots were scumbags, sleazy half-grown man-children who would use someone like Sakura's emotional distress as a way to get into her pants, but Syaoran, who was fairly obvious about liking her in his own ridiculous, blushing manner, would be appalled at the mere suggestion.

Neither of the kids had noticed him, and Kurogane generally made it a rule of thumb not to interfere with their private moments, so he silently backtracked down the corridor some distance before stomping back up to the bridge rather harder than he needed to, his steel-capped boots loud against the metal grating. When he arrived a second time Syaoran was sitting bolt-upright in the pilot's chair, pretending to be absorbed in one of the (inactive) displays, while Sakura was drying her eyes with the front of her overalls.

"Captain," she said. Her voice was thick and clogged, but she cleared her throat and tried again, her eyes daring him to comment on it. "Captain, did you find anything?"

"Yeah," Kurogane said, and Syaoran swiveled his chair around, looking eager. "Some spacer business guy, wants gemstones delivered to his girl on Mars."

"He already delivered the cargo and left this," Syaoran said, tossing over the payment chip. Kurogane took it and ran it through his reader, for the second time today. "They took up two cargo pods. Are we going to wait to fuel up 'til Mars?"

Kurogane thought about it, then nodded assent. Fuel was cheaper from Mars, Earth gouging more in tax than the Martian colony leaders. "We also have a passenger," he said, neutrally as possible, and Syaoran and Sakura exchanged a look.

"A dirtboy?" Sakura asked, sounding curious. It took Kurogane a moment to recognize the term - Martian derogatory for Earthers. Sometimes he forgot that for all the time Sakura and her brother had spent in space they were Martian born and bred.

"A rich one," he said. "With cargo."

"How much cargo? How rich?" Syaoran inquired.

"'bout this big," Kurogane replied, measuring out the crate's reported dimensions in the air, and Syaoran frowned. "He wants it stored with him. He's paying half a million." Syaoran lifted his eyebrows, smiling. Sakura tilted her head to one side.

"That's an awful lot of money," she said. "Where are we taking him?"

"Europa," said Kurogane. His reader bleeped; the card contained the required deposit for the gemstones, now safe in one of his accounts. He tossed the depleted card back to Syaoran and put the reader away, folding his arms and leaning against the door frame. "He wants to leave soon as."

"We still need the air changed," Syaoran said, turning his chair back around; the screens woke up as he nudged the touch pad, the ship's excuse for an AI coming slowly online. "I already had the septic tanks drained and the nuclear fuel rods replaced, but we're still running on stale air, it'll take... three hours to refresh the air supply."

"Get it started. Our passenger looked jumpy. I'd like to get him and his money out of here before whatever he's running away from comes after him."

"What do you think it is?" Sakura asked. "If his cargo contains stolen goods... I've heard nasty things about the old Earth mafia."

Kurogane had, too. Everyone knew the Martian triads were scary, had ever since they'd hit that cruise ship, killing three hundred people to get at six. And everyone said they weren't a patch on the Earth Cosa Nostra, who had ties to the most powerful military force in the solar system and years of nastiness behind them. "I don't know," he said, truthfully.

"How did he find you?" Syaoran asked over his shoulder, the ship AI silently communicating the space dock one to arrange their new air supply.

Kurogane hesitated before answering, and Sakura's eyes flashed. "It's alright," she said. "You can say it. My brother sent him to you, right?"

She must see confirmation in his eyes, because she looked away, her green eyes sad and her mouth a small line, and Kurogane sighed. "You could talk to him, you know."

"I can't," she said, with a sad smile. "It's not safe. Not for either of us."

This was familiar territory, and she already knew his opinion, and anyway, wasn't like it was any of his business. He turned away from her, somewhat awkwardly, and tried to cover it up with more orders. "Can we get some furniture taken out of the fourth cabin? He was clear about that carton of his traveling with him."

"Yes, I can do that," said Syaoron. "Where are we meeting him?"

"South lockers," said Kurogane. "Not for a few hours yet. You got confirm from the dock AI on the air supply?"

"Mostly."

"Well, get that then sort out the cabin. I need to go bribe customs," he said, scowling, and pointed at Sakura. "Can you finish up with the engine? I don't really want to die after cutting the tether 'cause you left it like it is now."

"Yes, captain," she said, but she was smiling as she made her way out. She never seemed bothered by his cantankerous nature. Syaoran reached above his head and retrieved his headset, sliding the earpiece in neatly and adjusting the mic; Kurogane left him to it.

There was a lot for a captain to do before take off, even in a small ship like this. He couldn't focus on the blond for too long.

No matter what kind of secrets he was hiding.

* * *

><p>He dreamed that night, which was unusual. He rarely remembered his dreams, not like Fai; he only knew he <em>did<em>dream because his twin had told him of his restlessness during the night.

He was back in the facility he had rescued Fai from not forty-eight hours ago, standing in the first break room with his blaster in one hand and a flash grenade in the other, his thumbnail hooked in the pin. Corpses - more than he remembered making - lay across the steel floor, some of them still smoking from the blaster's plasma bolts, which had vaporized large chunks of flesh. In the distance he could hear Fai weeping, a pained noise that resonated in his chest, in time to the beat of his heart.

He wanted to go to his twin but there was a body in the way, stood motionless before him with its arms folded across its chest. It had been a woman, in life; it wore a jacket labeled _Mumbai U_, unzipped over its body armor, and its head was missing, its neck a blackened, charred stump with the wet gleam of uncooked viscera just visible.

"I was just doing my job," she said mournfully, her voice pouring from her opened throat. He could see her larynx, or what he assumed was her larynx.

"I'm not sorry," he told her, hearing Fai's voice in the distance. "You knew what you were signing up for when you sold yourself to the military. Don't guilt trip me."

" _Monster_," she hissed.

"Yeah, probably," Yuui said, and he popped the pin off the flesh grenade, pressing it against her chest. It went off with more power than it ought, and he felt it disintegrate his right arm to the elbow as the light blinded him; the shock of the blast flung him backward through the air, and with a jolt he came to consciousness on the stale mattresses in the hospital storeroom to no noise but the hum of the cryo-capsule's inbuilt generator. It was nearly dark, with only the few lamps he'd turned on during his trip here, and the muted blue glow of the capsule's interface panel.

His heart was in his mouth and he flexed his arm, watching the fingers move, reassuring himself of its presence. The cold storage unit display said he'd only been asleep for a few hours.

He didn't feel refreshed.

Yuui got up slowly, moving like an old man. His muscles ached and protested; he couldn't remember the last time he'd slept on anything approaching a soft surface, but he walked his fingers over Fai's pod and told himself it didn't matter, that he could cope. The readings on the screen indicated nothing abnormal had happened to his brother, at least, although he thought the bar recording Fai's brain processes had changed a little from the last time he had looked.

He fished out some of the processed nutrition bars from the grocery bag and sat, cross-legged, before the capsule. The goods Saiga had given him were stuffed down at the very bottom, under the folded uniforms, the three fresh-forged IDs and the government-issue badge all sitting there with his name on them; he could use the medical courier card to get the cold storage unit out of the hospital without risking it in the air ducts. He'd even been given overalls for the space docks and a baseball cap with the courier company logo on it. He'd probably paid far more than he should have for such services; Fai had always been the one who spent their money, since he wasn't afraid to haggle with the merchants.

As he ate he dipped his hand into the bag and found the contact lens case, popping it open with his thumbnail. The lenses would make his eyes look brown, and with the black dye, he hoped it'd make him look quite unremarkable for this part of the world. He wasn't sure whether or not to cut his hair. The photograph of him on the news program had shown him with short hair; it had grown long since he had escaped from the academy, while he tried to work out how to get to Fai, although not as long as Fai's had.

In the end he decided to leave it long. People would be on the lookout for a man with short pale hair, not long dark hair. Saiga had given him a bag of clothing, too, and he checked that out next; spacer's garb, mostly, jump suits and underwear and three packs of the white cotton t-shirts that men mostly made work as everything from outerwear to sleepwear to thermal layers. He'd included a second set of boots, which was fortunate, because Fai didn't have any. If he did decant his brother in space, now there was clothing enough to go around.

He wasn't hungry, but he ate two more nutrition bars before turning to the matter of getting dressed, his twin's voice in his mind nagging him to eat more no matter how unappetizing they were. His telekinesis used up a lot of energy, and he had overstretched himself recently; if Fai were... himself, he'd be getting an earful. Fai always thought he didn't take enough care of himself, and -

_No_, he thought. _Don't go there_. Don't think about how much you miss being taken care of. Don't think about how much help Fai needs. You have to save him. You've done it before.

His hands shook as he reached for the dye sachets, but he set himself to applying the stuff with determination, and eventually the shaking stopped. He could see the cryo container in the mirror, and it gave him resolve. Sure, he had gotten Fai to the hospital all those years ago, with the pneumonia. Sure, he had kept Fai calm when he had those... weird moments. But Fai looked out for him, Fai had saved his life in a hundred little ways every day for most of his life, and he was going to return the favor no matter what.

As the dye set in he double-checked the cupboards, hunting for anything that might prove slightly useful; he put painkillers in the bag of clothing, inside the spare boots, and sleeping pills bundled up in socks. He hesitated over a packet of hypodermic needles and a hypnospray with no cartridges before tossing them both in, too, since he wasn't sure what the medical supplies would be like on the ship or even if he would be entitled to them. He added two rolls of bandages and a blood sampler, for running tox screens; he was familiar with the military version of the device, since poison was a possibility in guerrilla warfare, and thought he could use the medical version to see what drugs they'd pumped into Fai. Tranquilizers, probably, to keep him quiet.

By the time he had finished sorting out the medicine he had four hours until his meeting with the smuggler; the dye in his hair had set, so he pulled the courier company baseball cap on, twisting his hair into a scraggy ponytail. There was an empty trolley in the corner of the room, and he used his telekinesis to heft the cryo capsule onto it before he changed into the courier uniform, slipping a false ID badge onto the front. Saiga had offered to sell him false facial hair as well, but he hadn't been convinced; he looked weird enough already, with his brown eyes and dark hair, less like Fai and therefore wrong.

With his bags over his shoulder, and the capsule on the trolley, he looked no different to any other medical courier. Nobody would think anything of him. Patients were often transferred between hospitals in cryo, if their condition was severe enough. He took a deep breath, trying to center himself. He could do this, he would do it, because he had to.

He popped the door open and pushed his brother out into the corridor. It was empty, a clear shot to the elevator, and he made his way there with his head held high.

He had promised Fai freedom, no matter what form it took. Either he would have to stop his own twin's heart, or they would get away clean. He hoped it would be the latter.

Either way, in twenty four hours, it would be over.

* * *

><p>They woke again for real late afternoon, the sun thick and golden across the bare tiles of the floor. Fai had contrived in his sleep to push Yuui onto his back and was lying mostly on top of him, and Yuui could feel his brother's morning erection against his thigh. He yawned and turned and pressed his nose into his twin's neck, behind his ear; Fai smelled of sleep and sweat and very faintly of disinfectant, and he twitched against Yuui's chest. Yuui shoved him off the sofa, blanket and all, and grinned at his indignant yelp. "Go shower," he said, when Fai stuck his tousled head up and glared at him. "Make it a cold one."<p>

"Sorry," Fai said, flushing faintly, like he could stop his hormones. Yuui threw the cushion that had functioned as his pillow at his twin with his luck and his twin scowled at him petulantly before standing up, wrapping the blanket around his waist, and shuffling into their tiny bathroom. Without his twin warming him Yuui realized he was cold and got up himself, hunting clothes; he found the jeans Fai wore yesterday and the shirt he'd worn lying on the floor next to the kitchen table and pulled them on, digging socks out of the bag that contained their clothing to protect his feet from the chill of the bare floor.

Distantly he heard the shower start up and bit his lip, sneaking over to the cupboards and taking a glass from the shelves, which he filled with water from the faucet. Fai wouldn't approve if he caught him doing this, which was why Fai always got first shower when their mother returned home after a late night; Yuui didn't hate their mother the way Fai claimed to. He didn't think _Fai_hated their mother the way he claimed to, but he crept toward his parents' bedroom on socked feet and listened out for the shower anyway.

He opened the door, intending to just put the glass of water on the night table next to his mother's side of the bed, and stopped as his brain attempted to make sense of what he saw. His hand shook on the door knob and he blinked a few times, as if that could change the outcome, and then he put the glass on the dresser next to the door frame and leaned against the jamb, folding his arms across his chest and hunkering in his shoulders to stop them from shaking.

It took Fai five minutes to finish up, and Yuui didn't move the whole time; when the bathroom door finally opened behind him he just turned his head and looked at Fai as he emerged in a towel.

"Yuui," Fai said, scowling. "What are you doing? Let her sleep."

"She's dead," Yuui said, his voice distant to his own ears, and Fai's expression changed subtly. He came to Yuui's side and looked over his shoulder, and breathed out slowly when he took in their mother, sprawled lengthwise across her bed with the sour smell of vomit in the air and her lips as blue as her glassy, unblinking eyes.

"Don't look at that," Fai said, instinctively taking control. He took Yuui's arm and tried to turn him away, but Yuui shook him off. "Yuui-"

"She was alive," Yuui said, his voice cracking although he didn't think he felt anything. "She talked to us and I knew she had taken chrysameth and I knew she shouldn't mix it with alcohol and I didn't -"

"Yuui, no -"

"I should have stopped her, I -"

"You didn't -"

"I didn't say anything, all that time she was talking, I should have -"

"No! Come on," Fai snapped, grabbing Yuui's wrist, and forcefully dragging him away, slamming the door closed behind him as though that could make Yuui forget his mother, the sorrowful expression on her waxy, dead face.

"It's my fault," Yuui said woodenly, and Fai seized his arms and shook him.

"What could you have done? Yuui -" he began and then stopped, looking away with an odd expression on his face. Yuui tipped his face forward, letting his hair hide his eyes, and took deep gulping breaths. His chest ached and he felt weightless, lost in his guilt, and there was a pressure inside his skull that seemed to be increasing, a stabbing pain centered behind his left eye. "Yuui," Fai said again, his voice deadly calm, and wound his arms around Yuui's shoulders, "stop that."

"I can't," Yuui said tightly.

"I mean your luck," Fai said, in that same neutral voice, and Yuui jerked his head in shock and looked past his twin to see that Fai was right; his luck was acting without his intention. Cutlery floated lazily midair above the kitchen countertops, and as he watched the chairs rattled and then followed. Their father's crate of empty booze bottles was emptying slowly upward; one of them _clinked_as it bounced off the ceiling. The kitchen table itself began to quiver as though it wished to join the aerial household items, and the sofa lurched as one half lifted up.

"I'm not doing this," Yuui said, his heart thudding. "I'm not - I don't know how to stop this! Fai, what do I do?"

"Think 'down'?" Fai suggested, and hugged him closer. His skin was still wet from the shower. Yuui screwed his eyes shut and thought _down_as hard as he could, but his mind kept flashing to his mother, morbidly wondering if she was floating behind that door too.

"It's not working," he said, and Fai paused thoughtfully and then moved his mouth close to Yuui's ear. "I can't focus - I'm sorry, Fai, I don't know how this happened, I - I can't stop thinking about her and I -"

"She's dead," Fai said, brutally, and Yuui flinched. Fai paused, looking back over at the items floating, and then turned around again, understanding in his eyes. "She's dead," he said. "We need to get to work. We can call the hospital I guess, have them pick her up."

"She was our mother," Yuui said, shocked.

"Was," Fai repeated coldly, and his words were harsher than a slap. Yuui recoiled from him physically, tears stinging his eyes, and then it was like something inside his chest tore open and he was crying, and with a crash the items began to rain from the sky, bottles shattering across the floor like weapons. Fai kept his arms around him and brought them gently to the floor as glass shards flew through the air, and Yuui buried his face in his twin's chest. "It's okay," he said, as the chairs hit the ground solidly, legs splintering off. His voice was thick, choked with his own grief. "It's okay, Yuui, it's okay, ssssh, sssssh. I'm here, it's okay."

Yuui couldn't say anything, just busy sobbing, grief and guilt and pain, and Fai held him close, his twin's tears falling into his hair. Yuui couldn't tell what he was sorry for most; for the mother he had loved despite himself, who had covered his small hands with her own and guided his pen over the page to spell out his name, or the loss of everything she could have been. Fai presence was a grounding force, something solid he could lean against.

He cried himself out, curled there on the floor with only the door separating them from their mother's body, the floor littered with glass and wood. When he was finished he lay limp in Fai's arms for a long time, too dazed and drained to move. He had known death, of course; he saw it every day at work, and with employers and coworkers in criminal circles, it wasn't like the people he knew were immune to death. It had happen to acquaintances. _Where's Lu today? The police got him? Tch, it'll be the firing squad this time. Shouldn't have fucked up and got caught._

"Are you okay now?" Fai asked, gently. "We're going to be late."

Yuui wasn't okay, he'd never be okay, but he nodded nonetheless. Fai helped him to his feet. His own eyes were red and scratchy, but he turned away from Yuui and pretended like they weren't, and suddenly Yuui needed to be close to him. He reached out, catching Fai's shoulder, and turned him back. "Don't shut me out," he said.

Fai smiled, and now Yuui knew it for the false thing it was. His palm itched, his shoulder quivering; he wanted it gone from Fai's face but he didn't want to hit him, he never wanted to hit Fai, so before he could think about it he leaned forward and kissed his twin, a wet cold kiss with the salt of their tears on their lips. Fai tensed, all over.

_What am I doing,_Yuui thought, and leaned away, ashamed of himself, but before he could move away too far Fai grabbed him by the wrist. His eyes were wide, but Yuui didn't think it was in surprise at the act so much as that it had been Yuui to initiate it.

For a long time they stared at each other, and Yuui was reminded suddenly of his childhood silence. He had known how, he had a voice, but for so long he hadn't used it because Fai could talk for him and Fai never needed to hear him to know what he thought, they both read each other's words in their body language and expressions. Fai's expression was telling him something he didn't understand, but he dared not ask, not aloud. Instead he stepped back into Fai's space, touching his fingertips gently to the inside of Fai's elbow. He could still feel the grief, the pain, like a wound inside that hurt more the more he thought about it, and he thought Fai did too even if he wanted to pretend otherwise. He fixed his gaze intently on Fai's face, asking for help, asking _to_help.

Moving stiffly, uncertainly, Fai leaned toward him and kissed him back, and Yuui felt some of that pain recede, washed out by blind gratitude. Their mouths were fumbling and rough, the kiss sloppy and horrible, but for now, it was enough.

He hadn't thought his mother could die because she was _his_ mother, and with his gift he had thought there was nothing he couldn't do. Between Fai and his gift he had thought they were _safe_. He had learned now that he was wrong, but as he curled his fingers in Fai's hair, their lips meeting awkwardly, he thought he would try harder to keep Fai safe.

After all, Fai was the only thing he had left.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	5. 4: looking for a new world

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Although we are both working on all parts of the story, chapter three was mostly written by Reikah and chapter four was mostly written by me._

_Regarding the twins' names: we are NOT using the Holitsuba names in this universe. In other words the Fai we know from TRC is Yuui in this world, and Fai is the real Fai._

* * *

><p>Yuui felt the passage of time like a physical thing, as though each passing second were a drop of water falling into his skin like some ancient Chinese torture. Every minute was a trial, every delay was excruciating; all made worse by the fact that he was no longer sure exactly how long it had been. How long since he broke into the base and mowed a path through human bodies towards his goal? How long since he had carried Fai up the side of the hospital building? How long since he had met with the sharp-edged, dark-haired smuggler in the bar? He couldn't even tell for sure any more, and the slipping away of his sense of time brought on a threatening sense of panic.<p>

One thing he was sure of: he had waited too long.

The alarms had gone up long ago, and the military higher-ups had gotten their story straightened out enough to put the word out to the civilians. The broadcast he had seen so briefly on Saiga's TV was proof of that. He doubted the civilian authorities had any idea exactly what they were looking for or why, but every transportation authority had gone into Orange status as the hunt for the "terrorist" went on.

He could no longer rely on the confusion of his enemies and his own luck to get them through to safety. All he had to rely on was his own wits, and the pocket full of stolen cash that he didn't dare use without being traced.

Getting up the space elevator wasn't the problem. The constant, massive flow of tourism provided a revenue for the spaceport facilities that their masters were reluctant to mess with; hundreds of people every hour riding up in the glorified cable-car to the massive observation decks that hung above the atmosphere. All so that they could look out the window, and coo excitedly, and eat over-priced "astronaut food" at the bars, and ride back down to earth in smug safety to tell all their friends and family they had _been in space. _

No doubt there were cameras trained on the tourist crowd from every angle, but Yuui had avoided the highly-populated, highly-scrutinized tourist cars. Instead he'd ridden up in one of the ballast cars, the counterweights that made the space elevators run on a minimum of fuel. They were nothing more than undecorated, airtight boxes filled with blocks of weights, with blocks added or removed to counterbalance each load of people or shipping goods that went up or down. Yuui had merely crawled into the open space and sealed himself in; and hope that he had enough oxygen with him to last him the five-hour trip into orbit. The air had been getting unpleasantly close by the time he'd arrived, as he tried not to think about the vast airlessness of vacuum pressing in from all directions.

But that was only the first step. All the real security lay in the screen between the observation decks and car loading platforms, and the station itself. It made sense, in a way; unlike the chaotic, open-air groundside spaceport - where one could merely jump a fence in the right place to get into the facility - in the hermetically sealed environment of a space installation not an ant could walk down the brightly-lit corridors without being seen. Let alone a man. Let alone two men, one of them obviously ill… or one man and a man-sized crate.

Yuui kept his hair tucked into his hat and his head down, going along with the ebb and flow of the crowd and trying not to draw attention to himself. Under the brim of his hat he watched the line of businessmen and travelers being chivvied through the security checkpoint, and wanted to whimper. The security was tighter now than he had ever seen it. Usually the security checkpoint involved no more than processing of documents and a simple body scan for weapons, explosives, or viral electronic; with the occasional traveler being pulled aside for a random check.

Now, though, the line backed up and wound along the corridor as each and every passenger was subject to a fingerprints and retina scan. The scanning of tickets and passports which should have been instantaneous now took long seconds, as the computers verified each and every byte of data with a security database on Earth rather than merely certifying that the credentials' formula was valid. Saiga's fake ID and credentials would never pass here; even if they had, the Earth government already had his prints and retina on file.

Yuui pressed his palms against his pants to dry them, and swallowed against a feeling of sickness. For a wild moment he was tempted to just give up this idea, to crawl back down to Earth and find some safe bolt-hole to hide in until this had all blown over. But it was too late; he was committed now... and there was no going back without Fai.

Deep breaths. Yuui forced himself to think. They hadn't spotted him yet; they didn't know he was here, or else they would just lock down the terminal and hunt through the crowd until they found him. This scrutiny was no more than the standard procedure for an elevated security alert, the government locking down all possibility of escape while they combed the city below for him.

And that meant that for all the show of force, the security officers were still doing things by the books; they had no particular reason to think anything else was wrong. And that meant…

Yuui let the crowd carry him away from the checkpoint, not changing his gait or raising his head until they moved towards the more thinly populated end of the concourse. There was less decoration here, less attempt to make the Earth tourists feel welcomed and at home; just a row of steel doors marked NO ADMITTANCE.

Yuui ducked into the last bathroom on the tourist side of the concourse, and once inside he quickly went to work changing his clothes. A pair of coveralls came out of his duffle bag and he yanked them on over his nondescript civilian clothes; he transferred his credit chit and the shipping receipt from the bottom of the duffle to his pocket with exquisite care. He stuffed the empty duffle bag into a trash chute - it marked him too obviously as a tourist - turned his jacket inside out, and when he walked out of the bathroom he was as nondescript and unremarkable as any of the other janitorial or maintenance personnel who inhabited the back ends of the station.

A burly older man in a set of coveralls just like his was buzzing into the NO ADMIT doors as he came out of the bathroom. He carefully timed his gait so that he arrived at the door just before it swung closed behind the other man; reached out and held it almost closed for a minute while he pretended to tap the keypad, then eased himself through the door. From the camera's perspective, it looked just like two men going through the door one after another; from the lock's perspective, it had only been opened once, with perfectly valid authorization.

Once he was in the maintenance corridors he allowed himself to take a breath, but not too much of one. There were fewer cameras back here, but the area was crawling with station personnel who all knew each other and wouldn't be fooled by his disguise for a minute. As soon as they found out he had no official reason to be here, the jig would all be up.

Fortunately, there were others in this labyrinth of steel and disinfectant who had no official reason to be here.

The elevator cars went once an hour, a carefully ordered progression in the slow and stately dance that brought five going up and five going down. There were actually twelve cars total; two of them were always pulled out of the line for maintenance and cleaning. In such a fast-paced, demanding environment, Yuui was willing to bet that even the Earth-regulated Allied Spaceports would cut corners.

Decom rats - decontamination was the proper name, running the scrubbers over the elaborate mechanical pistons again and again and again to keep friction from slowing the parts, or the dangerous contaminants from building until they would pose a danger to humans. Normal employee humans, of course. The decom rats themselves didn't count.

Kids were best because they were smaller, they could get in and out of tight spaces and needed less disinfectant to rinse down afterwards. There were machines that could do the same thing, but they were expensive to buy and expensive to run, and people in all times and places found it easier to resort to cheap labor instead of pricey technologies. And in all times and places there were kids that, for one reason or another, no one was taking care of; kids who would do anything for a couple of extra yenbucks, kids whom nobody would miss if something bad happened.

Memories assaulted Yuui as he walked down the steel grate overlaying the thrumming pipes beneath. He and Fai had spent too much time as children, scampering through hallways like these, climbing in and out of processing tanks just like those. It was strange to be on the other side of things for the first time, to be one of the towering adults who'd always held the power of pay or no pay - and of life and death - over them.

It was hair-raising work, ducking the attention of the other employees without being too obvious that he was doing so; several times he had to quickly pretend to be working on something, and memories of his old jobs came swarming back to him as he found himself doing old, too-familiar tasks. Finally though, he saw what he'd been looking for; a short, suit-clad figure scampered across one of the empty holding bays.

Yuui quickly altered his course to intercept, but the kid was fast - they all had to be fast. He nearly disappeared behind another door before Yuui caught up with him, and he had to use a little bit of telekineses to aid his grab.

"Hey!" the kid squawked, but there was no one immediately within range to come to his aid. Yuui let the door slam shut and pushed the kid up against it, blocking his exit routes. "What was that for?"

The kid's eyes widened, and narrowed, and his first look of indignant outrage sharpened into interest. "Who are you? You're not one of the guys who works here."

"No," Yuui agreed; there was no point in pretending to be a new worker or anything like that, all the personnel would be intimately familiar with staff changes on their shift. "I'm just passing through. I need to get over to the station side."

"Why?" The interest stiffened into wariness. "You're not trying to steal stuff, are you? 'Cos if you are, I'm gonna yell and call the boss here right away. Or else you're not trying to break stuff, are you?"

"No and no," Yuui said with an emphatic headshake. "I'm not trying to get anyone in trouble." Well, that was sure the truth. "I just need a route over into the south wing of the station without passing through security. Do you know a way?"

The kid frowned at him, evidently mistrusting his motives. "Why would I know something like that?" he said in a not-quite innocent tone. "I'm just a temp worker they hired to work out on the shells. I don't have access to the dockside stuff."

By which he meant, he wasn't registered and he didn't have an entry badge. Right. "But you must have some way to get into the station, don't you?" he pressed. "The other guys, they send you on errands sometimes - pick up laundry, get coffee, bring them lunch, for a couple extra yen. Don't they?"

He and Fai had often been sent on similar harmless, mundane errands while they were working in the same job - most likely, he now realized, because the other guys felt sorry for them. And he could tell by the kid's expression that he'd hit a mark. "I - there's a door I go through," he admitted. He took a step back, looking Yuui up and down, and frowned. "But I don't think I ought to take you there."

"Why not?" Yuui's heart was beating double-time in his chest, and he stretched his face into a charming smile. _People will do so much more for you if you_ smile, _baby. _"It's a little favor I'm asking, nothing more. I'll pay you. A hundred yenbucks if you get me through the door and don't say anything to anyone."

He realized a moment later that he'd misstepped; he should have offered five or ten at the most. The kid's face lit up in amazed greed at the thought of that much money; and then, moments later, clouded over in uncertain doubt. Because with that amount of money this couldn't possibly be a simple favor; there had to be a catch.

"No," the kid said, his voice shaking a little and then firming up. "No, I don't think I oughta do that. I'm not gonna let you get me in trouble."

"Please, I really need to -" Yuui started, but the kid shook his head firmly.

"I said no!" he said in a louder voice. "Whatever you're doing, I don't want to be part of it! So piss off before I call the boss, and he'll call security on you!"

Yuui froze momentarily in panic, before angry reason kicked in. No, it was a bluff. No decom rat would ever risk getting tangled up with security, because - The kid tried to push past him and Yuui grabbed his shoulder, throwing him back against the doorway and pressing him there. "No," he growled. "I don't think you will."

The kid looked at him in mixed terror and outrage, thin ribcage expanding as he took a breath to yell. Before he could, Yuui plunged his hand into his jacket and pulled out the fake health and safety inspector's badge that Saiga had provided him with and flashed it in the kid's face. He froze, eyes going wide with the same terror that Yuui felt just a moment ago: the paralyzing fear of getting caught.

"You're not a member of registered maintenance or decontamination crew," Yuui snapped, "and you've got no clearance to be working on high-sensitivity machines like these. Your suit isn't rated for heavy vacuum work and you're under height, weight and age requirements for an S-class radiation environment." All of which were crimes, or at least negligences, being committed by his 'bosses' and not by the kid himself. But the kid wouldn't see it that way; Yuui never had until it was all over.

"I think security would report that you've got no more right to be in here than any other random passerby off the street, and what would they do if they found out you've been taking money from a federal payroll?" Escort him home, probably - maybe look into minor delinquent correctional services if they were feeling paranoid enough. But it would mean the end of this job and the end of his income, and that was a threat enough.

"No, don't!" the kid cried out in panic. "Please! You don't understand… I need this money! My mom's sick and my dad spends all her health dole money on booze and there's nobody else on the station who'll hire me, okay? I need - I just need - "

"_I_ need to get to the station side," Yuui interrupted him, not interested in hearing the whole sordid story of his life. It brought back too many painful memories. "Show me how you get there."

Without another word, the kid led him through the maze of steel and titanium corridors to another section, one that seemed even older - Yuui wondered if it hadn't been part of the original space station, before the elevator and docks had been built around it. There was a door here that didn't have a badge scanner; instead it had only a keypad, and the kid tapped out an access code quickly and without hesitation.

They came out the other side of the hatch in almost complete darkness. Yuui followed his guide's shuffling footsteps until they came out into a cross corridor and heard voices echoing from further on.

"That way," the kid said, pointing a hand in the dimness. "This comes out between a couple of businesses - a deli and a copy shop. There's a door at the end of the hallway, but it opens outwards and the alarm is turned off. Just - just don't tell anyone else, okay?"

"I won't," Yuui promised him fervently. He hesitated for another moment - a part of him wanted to follow up on his earlier offer, give the kid some money, maybe enough to get out of this killer job and into a better life - but the decom rat had already turned and fled his presence, back into the belly of the space station with an echoing crash.

Yuui had a moment's debate with himself as to whether he should change clothes again or not before rejoining the crowd. Eventually he just kicked off the canvas work overalls and stashed them in a dark corner; the rest of his clothes were drab enough to pass unremarked. With any luck the civilians would assume he was on some vague unspecified business errand, for the Station or for one of the half-dozen shipping companies who did a brisk business through the space lanes.

When he stepped out of the door into the civilian concourse, the return of light and noise after the cool dim utility tunnels made him stagger. An enticing smell of pastries and coffee wafted over from the promised deli and his stomach growled loudly, reminding himself that he hadn't eaten in far too long. _Soon,_ he promised his stomach. _Once we get on the ship - the smuggler will feed us._ Or at least Yuui hoped he would; surely he wouldn't expect Yuui to provide his own meals. Most likely he'd just charge Yuui an arm and a leg extra for the privilege of feeding him.

He began walking down the terminal, reluctantly bypassing the rows of restaurants and shops; he cast a longing look at the rows of vending machines decorating the grey walls, but they wouldn't take credit chits and he did not dare deal with any more human vendors than he had to. Who knew how many of them watched the news?

He found a directory and oriented himself; the south lockers were a fair hike away, but fortunately his other destination was on the way. His heart rose in his chest for the first time today and he took a long steady breath, straightened his shoulders, and set off down the concourse. Nobody noticed him; nobody challenged him. After all, he couldn't be here unless he'd gone through security once already… so he must belong here.

At least that was what he thought until he caught sight of one of the TV monitors hanging above the archways. The volume was muted, but the images running across the display were unmistakably a continuation of the story he'd seen on Saiga's television earlier… this time accompanied by his own face.

Pulse pounding, he kept his head down and the brim of his hat pulled over his face as he strode down the friction-matted corridor past the rows of businesses. At last the one he was looking for popped up in the row; the bright blue FEXIS logo blazed in the corner of his eye. He eased himself out of the concourse and the depot, and yes - thank god! - they had a row of automated teller kiosks in addition to the one harassed-looking woman at the counter. He'd hoped they would - any full-time employee on a space station was so expensive to house and pay for that every business who could automate their service did - but he couldn't have been sure.

He slipped to the kiosk at the end of the row, glancing involuntarily at the large glass doors at the end of the bay. All he could see was stacks and stacks of boxes. ENTER CODE OR SCAN QRC TO BEGIN, it prompted him in English, Chinese, and Japanese. His hands were shaking as he pulled his shipping receipt out of his pocket and held it up to the scanner.

This had to work. _Had to…_

The kiosk hummed crankily for a moment, then blipped up a large confirmation window. Shipping outlet, weight, dimensions, tracking code. IS THIS YOUR PACKAGE? the display asked him. The tracking display confirmed it was waiting for him at this very depot, on the other side of the glass wall. _Fai_ was waiting for him. Yuui blew out a shaky breath, and hit "Yes - Claim my package now."

He had to have been crazy to try this, but it was all he could think of. There was no way, no possible way that he could have smuggled the triage chamber through spaceport security, nor gotten Fai past the guards with the state he was in. As a last, desperate gamble, he'd turned to an alternate route - put the chamber into minimum internal power mode, taken it to the automated freight center nearest to the hospital, and ordered it shipped to the station to await pickup.

He'd only dared it because he'd been sure - and so far, it looked like he'd been right - that the government's manhunt wouldn't extend as far as the mail and freighting system, at least not yet. With their highest level of clearance they had access to any institution or business they wanted to invade and search, and at least theoretically they were tapped into every electronic database in the Earth sphere.

But Yuui knew that for all their supposedly infinite power, they had only limited manpower and resources; they could not possibly process every piece of data in the cybersphere at once. And they were still looking for a person; they had no way of knowing, yet, that he had run off with a portable triage chamber. No doubt any correspondence addressed to or by him would raise a red flag, but he had used one of Saiga's fake IDs to input the shipping label, and set the payment options to cash on pickup so his credit chit would not be traced until the last minute.

Indeed, the computer was now informing him in bright red letters that this parcel had not yet been paid for. CASH, CREDIT OR DEBIT? It demanded, and Yuui hurriedly punched in his chit's information. They could track it eventually, no doubt, but Yuui meant to be long gone from here before they got this far.

The system cranked some more, and then a red window flashed up. CONFIRMATION FAILED, Yuui's breath froze in his chest. Could they have found him already? They were so close, _Fai_ was so close, just on the other side of that door… could he tear this place apart as he had the facility, rip down the wall, find Fai's box among the thousands piled there? He would never make it…

Then he made his blurry eyes actually read the text on the screen. PACKAGE WEIGHT AND DIMENSIONS EXCEED LIMITS FOR PERSONAL PICKUP, it read irately. AN ADDITIONAL FEE WILL BE LEVIED TO CHANGE THIS PACKAGE RATE TO HEAVY FREIGHT. APPROVE FEE Y/N?

Y, he punched and breathed again, feeling dizzy from adrenaline overload. The kiosk hummed some more, and then blanked out. NO SUCH PACKAGE NUMBER FOUND IN HEAVY FREIGHT DATABASE, it told him. ENTER NAME OR SCAN QRC TO BEGIN.

"No!" he burst out, clutching at the side of the kiosk screens. "No, dammit, _no!"_

"Having trouble, sir?" a female voice asked at his elbow. He nearly jumped out of his skin and turned to see the mail clerk standing next to him, smiling brightly.

"No! Uh," he stuttered around for a lie, then a charming smile slid over his face and his tongue seemed to take on a life of his own. "Sorry about that. My stupid cousin asked me to come and pick up his package for him, but then the son-of-a - excuse me, the idiot made it cash on delivery!"

"Oh, dear," the clerk's expression turned sympathetic and concerned. "Well, if you really don't want to pay for it, you can reject the delivery… it'll be sent back to your cousin and he'll have to pay shipping both ways, but…"

"No!" he said hastily, blocking the clerk as she reached for the kiosk. "Uh, it's not worth getting into a fight with him," he said. "I'll just pick up the darn box and make him pay me back later. But, um, the system is giving me some trouble. It said it was too large for personal pickup, but then it couldn't find it in heavy freight…"

"Yeah, it does that," she said, and reached past him to tap at the keypad. The cutesy animations vanished, displaying white text on black screen, as she entered some kind of authorization code. "What's your pickup number?"

He handed over her receipt and stood back, fiddling nervously with his cuffs as she pulled up his order. His eyes flickered up to the TV screen on the wall above the counter; it was showing his story again, but the clerk didn't seem to be paying attention. Didn't watch TV on duty, perhaps? He was suddenly very thankful it had been a busy morning for her.

"Do you want me to try to waive the heavy freight fee?" she asked him suddenly, and he jumped again. "You're going to have to pay for the shipping either way, but it seems unfair that you should have to pay the surcharge…"

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her he didn't care about the money, just give him his package - but that had been what had alerted the decom rat, earlier, this desperate willingness to throw money in his path. "Um, if you can I'd be really grateful," he said with another charming smile; she flushed slightly, and threw her hair back before turning back to the kiosk. "Let me see what I can do!"

After an interminable delay, the kiosk beeped loudly and printed out a flimsy receipt. "Let me just run in the back and get this for you," she said. "Here, keep the receipt - you want to know how much your cousin owes you, after all."

She disappeared into the back, and Yuui waited anxiously, pretending to be interested in a magazine in order to keep his face low and hidden. At last she returned with a long, large crate on an antigrav trolley; she pulled it up in front of him and threw the switch.

"Here you go," she announced. "I'm afraid all of our dollies are in use right now; all we've got is the hand trucks used for loading smaller freight. But if you want to wait until we get one back…"

"No, that's fine," he said hastily. He pulled out a hand truck and laid his hands on the box, using a subtle bit of telekinesis to transfer the package onto the truck. It was even bigger than he was - naturally - and he had to continue using his talent to keep it balanced and steady. "I'm in a hurry."

"Are you sure?" she said, giving him a weird look. "It must be heavy…"

"It's not heavy at all - just bulky," he insisted, using his power to lift the package a short distance in proof. "I think he packed the smaller box in the bigger box and filled it with peanuts just to mess with me - he does that sometimes."

She giggled, and the suspicion disappeared from her face as he grinned back at her. "Okay, well, is there anything else I can do for you?" she asked.

"No," he said, "and if you'll excuse me - I have to catch a ship."

After that, all thoughts of maintaining appearances, or keeping a low profile, fled from Yuui's mind - he had to concentrate entirely on keeping the crate moving with him as he hurried through the increasingly narrow courseway. Here at the south end of the station - relatively, of course; it didn't actually correspond to any polar directions - he had passed out of the large commercial liners and into the berths containing the smaller, privately owned ships.

He rounded the final corner, skidding across the thin carpet as he dragged the hand trolley with him, and stopped abruptly as he faced a large, open bay. Rows of metal cabinets lined two sides, a third was filled with wide-spaced portholes, and the last one had imposing-looking metal doors. Airlocks, Yuui realized after a giddy moment. The whole place was painted in an odd shade of rusty brown.

This was the south lockers - at least, the map had said it was. But where was the smuggler?

His gaze swept the room; there were a few people here, but the looming, spikey-haired captain was not among them. His heart sank in dismay. What could have happened? Was he lost, late, discovered? Had the smuggler decided he wasn't coming and left without him, or had he just not arrived yet? Or had he seen the APB and been scared off, or -

There was no going back. Yuui swallowed heavily and approached one of the people in the locker - a teenager with messy brown hair and tan skin. By far the youngest and smallest of everyone in the lockers, he was methodically pulling lengths of tubing from a hose dispenser in the wall and coiling it neatly over his shoulder. Yuui wondered if he was a decom rat, and if so, whether he could be bullied for information or aid. "Excuse me," he said as he approached, "I wonder if…"

The boy looked up and his brown eyes widened. "Oh, yes?" he said in a polite tone. "Are you our passenger?"

Yuui hesitated, torn. "I - I don't know. Am I? The - the tall man told me to meet him here…"

"Yes! He told me you would be coming, with your cargo." The boy hoisted the tubing over his shoulder and stuck out his arm. "I'm Syaoran - nice to meet you. What's your name?"

"I'm…" He hesitated, unsure by what name he should introduce himself. For some reason he couldn't call any of the false IDs Saiga had given him to his lips; his mind was a total blank. But his own name had been plastered all over the TVs… He pasted a smile back on his lips, and said the one name he would not ever forget. "I'm Fai. Nice to meet you too."

"We'll get you all loaded up in just a minute," Syaoran was saying, and reached down to pick up his load. "We're almost done reconditioning for our trip to Mars, so we can leave within an hour or so. Did the Captain tell you the name of the ship?"

"No," Yuui said with some confusion. "He - he didn't even tell me his own name."

"Oh." Syaoran rolled his eyes. "He's like that sometimes. It's Kurogane by the way, or at least that's what he goes by, and this is his ship. Welcome aboard the Mokona!"

Syaoran darted away inside the hatch, calling "Hey, Captain! Our passenger's here!" Yuui drifted over to the port nearest to the airlock he'd gone through, looking out into the spaceyard. The absolute blackness of space - shot through with diamond-hard pinpricks of light - made him faintly queasy, but he was fascinated by his first sight of the spaceship he would be traveling on.

A pair of footsteps stomped through the hatch, and he looked up in time to see the smuggler emerging from the airlock. The big man glanced his way, his blood-red eyes sweeping over Yuui and the crate sitting next to him, and his expression hardened.

"You showed up," was all the man said, and his voice was as cold and unfathomable as his expression. He shoved an antigrav doily in Yuui's directions. "Your cabin's the first one on the left, up through the hatch. Get in and get loaded up, and then stay out of the way of the crew."

"Yes, Mister Kurogane," Yuui said, summoning up another bright grin. "My, what cheerful hospitality you have towards your guests!"

"That's _Captain_ to you," Kurogane snarled at him, and turned around and stomped back into the ship.

"Yes, Captain Mister," Yuui called after him, but got no reply.

It was awkward navigating the big crate through the narrow confines of the tiny ship, let alone through the narrow hatch overhead; someone without telekineses could never have done it alone. Yuui wondered why the big man hadn't stayed to help him load the cargo, big and heavy as it was. Not that he minded - it was easier not to have to hide his power, but it just drove home how unfriendly he was. Well, sweet or sour it didn't matter; he was getting Yuui and Fai out of this mess, and that was all that mattered.

He finally got himself and Fai stowed in their cabin - more of a cabinet or a small closet, really, and with the crate in the middle of the floor there was barely enough room to edge between the bed and the window. But none of that mattered either.

Yuui pulled himself onto the bunk bed, drawing his legs up onto the mattress in front of him; wrapped his arms around his torso, and finally let the shakes of terror overtake him.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	6. 5: right before your eyes

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Although we are both working on all parts of the story, chapter five was mostly written by Reikah and chapter six was mostly written by me._

_Regarding the twins' names: we are NOT using the Holitsuba names in this universe. In other words the Fai we know from TRC is Yuui in this world, and Fai is the real Fai._

* * *

><p>Yuui was sitting on the lip of the rooftop when Fai came to find him, trying his best to light a cigarette. The lighter was their father's and there wasn't much fuel left in it, and even when he did manage to spark a small flame the wind quickly erased it.<p>

There was a lot of wind up here. He was sitting on the very edge of the ridge that ran around the building, past the protection of the concrete safety barriers, his feet hanging over eight stories of nothing but air. It was an old building, tiny by modern standards, surrounded on all sides by skyscrapers jutting phallicly up at the stars. Cars were moving underneath him, beetle-bright and shiny, tiny like children's toys, but he wasn't afraid. Even if he did fall, he knew he could right himself with his gift, his... telekinesis.

He had heard the fire door clang when his twin emerged, and he knew who it was instinctively, some part of him as always able to identify his brother with no clues. The rooftop had been their hiding space since they were about six years old, when Yuui could first use his luck - his _talent_, he had to stop using the childish name for it - to help their small hands force the fire escape door open. It was an old building, strung with washing lines, but nobody bothered hanging clothes out to dry nowadays, not with all the smog and city-smells.

He didn't turn around, not even when Fai called his name; he had finally managed to get the lighter going and was cupping the spark carefully, shielding it from the breeze, as he ducked his head forward to touch the cigarette between his lips to the flame. He was snapping the lighter shut when Fai scrambled over the safety barrier, agile like a monkey, as trusting in Yuui's ability to catch him if he fell as Yuui was himself.

"There you are," he said, brightly. "I've been looking for you, why did you - is that a _cigarette_?"

"Yeah," Yuui said, taking a small drag. The oily smoke tickled at his throat and he coughed, but he took another one when he recovered; Fai was scowling at it, his blue eyes narrowed in distaste.

"Who gave it to you?" he demanded.

"Hanson did," Yuui replied, quietly. His hands were still shaking, he noticed with some detachment, watching the cherry-red glow of the lit end jitter in the air before him.

"The night shift manager? DJs? Flirts with the dancers?" Fai said, and Yuui nodded quietly. "Fine, I'll have to talk -"

"No, Fai, you won't," Yuui interrupted tiredly. "He gave me this and then told me he'd fired us."

It had reminded him somewhat of an execution; the offered cigarette, and then the bad news. Yuui had expected it, of course; Hanson's strip-club catered to some big business clients, and he'd decided the risks outweighed the benefits of keeping them, two scrawny janitors with questionable IDs, after Fai's little stunt. Yuui thought he might have done the same if he were in the man's shoes, which didn't make it easier.

"Oh," Fai said, and looked away. Yuui watched his twin's throat working out of the corner of his eye, and his hands itched with the urge to curl into fists. "I... that's... oh."

"Yeah. You caused quite a scandal when you had that fit. Two flights of stairs you fell down, wasn't it?"

"The hospital checked me out okay," Fai said, flushing indignantly. "I know you told them to do those scans, and they didn't find anything. Don't try to mother me, Yuui -"

"I _have to_!" Yuui snapped, and was surprised at the edge in his voice. "I have to, Fai, you've been scaring me and _you don't remember_! Did you take the pills I left out for you on the table?"

"No," Fai said, clearly taken off guard. "They're anti-psychotics, I don't -"

"I thought you had a _brain tumor_ or something," Yuui said, and realized the edge was nothing but pure fear, suppressed and kept hidden for too long. "You've been blanking out and... and having what the hospital psychiatrist called 'dissociative episodes' for years now, where you don't know what's going on, and you're always too _fucking _stubborn to see anybody, and I..."

"I've been _fine_," Fai said, but his fingers were knotting in his jacket.

"You lost a whole day six months ago," Yuui said, letting the anger bleach out of his voice. He was tired and scared, and Fai was just being himself, brave and stupid and stupidly brave. "'Fine' isn't reciting mathematical formula and not noticing anything else. 'Fine' isn't splitting headaches out of the blue, 'fine' isn't memory loss, and 'fine' is not collapsing at work and falling down two _fucking _flights of stairs."

Maybe he was still angry. He didn't like to swear usually, but Fai had flinched with each _fuck_, and Yuui mercilessly took advantage of it. His hands were shaking again. "I love you," he said, and he meant it in every single way, "but I'm scared, Fai."

Fai reached into the pocket of the hoodie he wore and withdrew the bottle of pills, the white label stamped with the hospital logo. Another sticker warned of the legal dangers of attempting to trade, sell or redistribute prescription medication; underneath that was printed the false name Yuui had given the hospital staff on Fai's behalf when he followed the ambulance in. He opened his mouth as if about to say something, but then closed it and put the bottle on the rooftop between them, still lidded.

"I don't like them," he said. "I don't think they help. Whatever... whatever the hospital shrink thought I had when she diagnosed them -"

"- Schizophrenia," Yuui supplied quietly.

"Yeah, that. I don't think that's what I've got. I don't like them, Yuui, they make me feel. Muted, I guess? Fuzzy. But I still _see_things, I just can't move about so much, and..." he pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "A whole day?" he asked, quietly, and Yuui nodded confirmation. "A whole day I don't remember. It wasn't just any day, was it?"

"It was our sixteenth birthday," Yuui said quietly, looking down at the cigarette still burning away in his hand. It was very nearly finished, and he wrinkled his nose and flicked it away on the wind.

"How can I just lose a birthday?" Fai said, sounding frustrated. "What did we _do_?"

Yuui looked at him for a few seconds, and then glanced down at his sneakers, hanging above the street so far below them. "We got some hot food on the way home. We, uh. We ate it. We went to bed."

"Liar," said Fai, with a trace of affection. "Please tell me."

Yuui sighed. "You fucked me, okay? It was the first time."

_You said, hey I have an idea, let's go up to the roof_, he thought. _And you made me bring our blankets and you had this... bag and when we got up here you put the blankets down and brought out this tarp you'd stolen from a dumpster somewhere, and you hung it over our heads like a tent so that nobody from the skyscrapers around us could see us. And then you kissed me and you asked if I wanted to, now that we were legal, and I said yes because you... you were so alive, I don't know. You looked so much like you and so not like me._

And it was messy and sore and fun, and I loved it, and I loved you, and I smiled so much my whole face hurt. And I woke up next morning stiff and aching and still so happy, and I went to wake you up and you looked at me with these lost eyes, wrapped up in the blankets and you said, Where are we?

And you didn't. Remember. Any of it.

"I what?" said Fai, staring at him wide-eyed, and Yuui sighed and ran a hand over his face. His eyes felt hot and dry, itchy.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "It was - it was just - never mind. Take your medicine. Just try them." He stood up, and Fai grabbed his sleeve, so fast he knocked his bottle of pills off the roof; Yuui caught them with his telekinesis and put them in his pocket. Fai's eyes were locked on his face.

"I'm sorry I don't remember," Fai said, and then bit his lip. "I am. Did I hurt you?"

"What? _No_!" Yuui said, shocked, and pulled his sleeve out of Fai's grasp. "Why would you even think you did?"

"Because I don't _remember_," Fai said.

Yuui's heart clenched in his chest, and he reached out, caught one of Fai's hands in his, cupped his brother's face with the other. "You would never hurt me," he said, gently, and kissed Fai, the sweet familiar taste of his brother settling him the way the nicotine hadn't.

"You taste like an ash tray," Fai told him when they parted, but some of the tension had ebbed from him. "Don't do that again."

"I won't," Yuui said, relieved to have the familiarly bossy Fai he was used to here, and Fai kissed him again, this time taking control of the kiss the way he usually did. Yuui curled his fingers into the back of his brother's shirt, felt Fai's heat all along his front, smiled into the kiss. It had been hard, holding it together while Fai was in the hospital; they had never been apart so long before, and his body was responding the way any teenager's would to the feel of Fai against it.

"I'm sorry I didn't remember last time," Fai told him, in between kisses, his hands hot and firm against Yuui's skin even through their clothing. Yuui hummed acknowledgment of his words, his mouth somewhat preoccupied with the warm, musky skin behind his twin's ear. "But maybe... maybe we can have another first time, Yuui."

Yuui paused to think about it for about as long as his sixteen-year-old hormones would let him, which was about five seconds. "Okay," he said, looping his arms around his twin's neck. "But not out here. Last time was in _summer_."

Fai smiled at him, his eyes bluer than the city skies, and said, "Dad won't be home for another four hours. You want to...?"

He tilted his head, and Yuui took his face in his hands, peering carefully into his brother's eyes, looking for hints of this unknown malady that made him so strange. All he could see was Fai, Fai who had been everything to him and still was. He paused for a few seconds, his thumbs stroking over his twin's cheekbones, and then he pressed their foreheads together gently, so close he could feel Fai's hot breath over his kiss-wet lips, and said, "I don't blame you, Fai. Whatever this is, it's. It's not your fault."

Fai jerked in his arms, and then whispered, "Thank you."

"Please be careful. I won't. I won't tell you what to do, but... please."

"You make it better," Fai said carefully. "Did you know that? Sometimes, you make it better. Easier to focus. I just, I see the colors and - and the lines in the world outside and then you're there and I can see you instead."

Yuui closed his eyes, smiled, and then nuzzled his nose against his twin's. "I'm not going anywhere," he said. "I promise. No matter how bad it gets. I'm not going anywhere."

For a while they stood there, pressed together, skin to skin, so close Yuui fancied he could feel Fai's heartbeat against his own chest. Finally he let go of his twin's face, sliding his hands down the fabric of Fai's hoodie, over the backs of his hands, and tangled their fingers together.

"Let's go have another first time," he whispered, and Fai's bright, happy laugh made him smile too.

* * *

><p>He woke up on the sofa the next morning, on his belly with the sun playing over his back. Fai was wedged tightly against his side, still on the outer edge. They were both too tall for the sofa by now; he had his legs bent at the knee, lying with his ankles over the sofa and Fai's feet tangled with his, and he smiled to himself. He could feel Fai doing <em>something <em>to the bare skin of his back, and it felt ticklish and yet comfortable.

"Morning," Fai said, cheerfully.

"Mmm," Yuui said, and turned to pillow his other cheek on his folded arms, trying to get his brother within his vision. Fai's eyes were narrowed in concentration, but when Yuui moved he looked up from whatever he was doing to Yuui's skin and smiled at him. "You all... you?" he asked, somewhat cautiously, and Fai rolled his eyes fondly.

"If you mean, 'do I remember fucking you,' the answer is a resounding yes," he said.

"Was I good?" he asked, quietly.

"Of course you were," said Fai, and all the love in his voice made Yuui's belly tighten in a good way. He felt sore, still, and sticky, but it was worth it for this.

For a while they lay there, Fai tracing lines across his back, arching over his shoulder blades and wrapping around his hips. It didn't feel like his fingers he was using, but it was a good feeling, like being worshipped, and Yuui felt a smile tugging at the corners of their mouth. He knew they ought to get in the shower, wash away the evidence of what they had done before their father came home, but...

"What are you doing?" he asked drowsily, and Fai paused.

"Doodling," he said.

"Where did you get the pen from?"

"I found it." He resumed his doodling then, the nib of the pen scratching lightly over Yuui's skin as Fai drew over his back, looping designs that swirled and shaped. "It's an equation," he said, sounding preoccupied.

"Oh?" said Yuui. It didn't feel like numbers, but his muscles were fluid and he was sated, and Fai didn't sound hazy or incoherent.

"Yes. It's a means of bending space and time to allow instantaneous transportation through space," Fai said distractedly, looping a line around his shoulder blade, and Yuui smiled, nuzzling into his arms.

"Faster than light travel, huh?" he said. "You genius, you."

"No. Faster than FTL. Instantaneous."

"If that were possible you could be a - a _gazillionaire_," Yuui said, and Fai barked a laugh.

"I think it already has," he said, and drew one last line, a shifting, flowing line right down the centre of Yuui's back, tracing along his spinal cord. "She was sentenced to the Lunar colonies for something she didn't do, and she was scared, so she jumped back here. And once she did it nothing was ever the same for her. The whole universe, in her head. I think I see now."

"... What?" Yuui said, opening one eye. Fai was frowning intently at the pattern he'd drawn over Yuui's back, but he shook his head as if to trace those thoughts away.

"It was... nothing. Just a feeling."

"Oh." Yuui frowned, studying his brother, but Fai's eyes were clear and he held eye contact steadily, and frankly, Yuui didn't think it was worth pursuing. At least it wasn't rambling babble about colors. "Are you done?"

"I... I think so." Fai touched his shoulders gently, tracing his fingers across whatever it was he had doodled, and Yuui rolled onto his side, showing his twin his belly and removing his back from reach.

"Okay," he said, capturing Fai's hand, and he kept his eyes locked onto his twin's as he put it on his stomach and slid it _down_. He flushed proudly at Fai's reaction, the mixed approval and surprise. "I, uh. I think I could go again."

The second time had been just as sweet as the first, perhaps all the more so because now they _both_ knew what they were doing. Yuui slid his hands over Fai's bare skin, panted into his twin's ear when Fai touched him just right, giggled into Fai's kiss, their mouths hot and wet and wanting, and he tangled his fingers in his twin's hair, the same fair shade as his own, and thought, _just this. Please. Forever._

Afterward they had gone for that required shower and he had gotten his first glimpse of the design Fai had drawn on him in the mirror, the thick black lines curving over shoulder and around his hipbones, the wavering lines like a phoenix taking flight. He had only seen it for a few seconds, before the steam from the water made the mirror fog up.

But for weeks afterward he was unable to shake the feeling that the pattern had _meant_ something, and if he only concentrated, he would see what it was.

* * *

><p>His shaking subsided eventually, of course. He was simply too tired and hungry to keep it up. He hadn't asked the smuggler - Kurogane - whether or not he was entitled to food, but he had been explicitly ordered to keep to his cabin, and so he stayed there curled in the corner of his bed, his back to the wall. He couldn't see the window from here, which was just fine with him. He didn't know how take-offs usually went, but the noises echoing up through the ship were getting increasingly loud; booms and clicks and thuds and voices, muffled and indistinct but raised, came through the wall of his cabin regularly.<p>

Yuui'd spent time in spaceship simulators, of course, both before his gift was discovered and after. And he'd ridden a suborbital shuttle twice, with Fai; neither were quite preparing him for the real thing. His mind couldn't stop running through the consequences of exposure out there, and he hunched into his corner, reminding himself that obviously the crew of the ship - Kurogane and Syaoran and whoever else might be on board - hadn't had any accidents yet.

He had stood there on the airlock of the space station and looked out of the window at his own planet, miles and miles beneath his feet, and it had hit him for the first time that he was leaving it and he would probably never be back. No more mesh of the old and new, buildings thousands of years old right next to shiny stratoscrapers. No more Earth television channels, sports teams, accents. No more familiar street corners and foods, and wide open roads that went on to nowhere. Everything would be different on Europa.

"It'll be worth it," he told the wrapped hulk of the triage capsule, and laid his hand gently over its disguised surface. He knew he was trying to reassure himself, but even as he said it he knew it was true. If Fai was safe, it would be okay.

Still, for a moment he felt the needling loss - the loss of his _home, _the blue and green planet he had been born to - under his breastbone, and quietly he climbed to his feet, swallowed back his nerves, and leaned out over the cryo capsule to look down over Earth's surface, the bands of thick white clouds, the green and brown and grey of the land and the blue of water.

He could see the boundaries between cities and farm plantations by the change in color; they were floating over the southern edge of the continent known as _Eurasia_ and he could see, with his mind's eye, the clumps of cities overlaid with neat dots of his classroom maps; the gigantic sprawl of Hong Kong-Shenzhen city-province, spreading across the coast for miles, grey and bleak and _home_. He touched his hand to the glass of the window just as someone knocked on his door.

Goodbye, he thought, and turned away.

"Come in," he said, climbing awkwardly back onto the bunk for lack of anywhere else to stand. He didn't think it was Kurogane knocking - the knock had been small, timid almost, and he rather thought if it had been Kurogane the big man would have just pounded on the door and probably yelled at him to come out. He seemed like the type who needed everything done _his _way.

Indeed, when the door hissed open, the person standing inside it could never be confused with the smuggler captain in any circumstances; she was a she, and young at that, maybe sixteen years old at best but probably younger. Her hair was cut short, framing her face, and when she smiled there was a hint of teeth to it, awkward and teenage. Yuui put a hand on top of Fai's crate, steadying himself, and then flashed her his liar's smile. "Hello," he said pleasantly.

"Hi there," she said, with a sweet smile. "I just wanted to welcome you aboard the ship, and apologize for the captain. Have you got everything stowed okay?"

She was looking at the crate as she said this, and a small line appeared between her eyebrows, no doubt wondering what it was and how he had managed to get it here by himself. Yuui hastily headed her off and said, "Yes, thank you. I'm sorry, I don't know your name...?"

"Oh! It's Sakura, I'm the ship's engineer... but you probably worked that out already." She tugged at the coveralls she was wearing and grinned ruefully, and he smiled back at her, a little less fake. She seemed harmless enough. "I just wanted to tell you we're prepared for lift off, we're just waiting on the all clear from Station control. Um. Did you maybe... want to come have a look around? I can't imagine the captain let you, he can be very..."

She hesitated, looking for the right word.

"Yes," said Yuui, smiling. "He was _very_. I haven't been to space before, I'd love a look around."

"Oh! Not ever?" She was staring at him with wide eyes. "Wow, you Earthlings are so - um. Sorry, that is - really not _ever_?"

"Never ever," he assured her solemnly, and the incredulity on her face drained a little of the lie from his smile. "I haven't needed to before, but, well, with Earth's economy the way it is..."

He trailed off enticingly, and knew he had her; she seemed to share the same idealized version of Earth the colony kids at the Academy had had, usually arriving straight from the domes or the space station expecting utopia and finding grime. "Wow," she said. "We always just assumed - um, that is, I'm from Mars, you see. I've never been down to the surface of Earth. Is it as rich as everyone says?"

"I don't know who 'everyone' is," Yuui said. "But it's the same as Mars, I should imagine. Very rich people, less rich people, poor people."

"Oh." She bit her lip, and then shook her head, her sandy brown hair flying. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't ask questions, it's - we're very discreet." This last was said with all the seriousness of the young, and she no doubt believed it; Yuui nodded and shifted on his bunk. "Would you like to come see the rest of the ship? The captain and Syaoran-kun are in the cockpit, they won't mind. Although the captain might grumble anyway, you just need to know not to listen to him. He complains about _everything _but he's a good man. And Syaoran-kun is a really good pilot! He can fly rings around everyone!"

"Are they from Mars too?" Yuui asked idly, and she nodded and then changed her mind and shook her head.

"Syaoran-kun is," she said. "We think the captain is from one of the station colonies, but he doesn't talk about it much. Best not to ask. Um, shall we get going? I'd like to show you the engines before we lose the space station gravity."

It was a bit of effort to climb off his bunk and get out the cabin around the cryo capsule, but he managed it. Once he was out Sakura showed him how to use the keypad to close the door, and also how to lock it if he wanted a bit of privacy.

The bottom layer of the spaceship was built around a giant ring, with the cabins and a rec room on the outside; their cabin was next to Sakura's, and she was to the left of Syaoran's. Kurogane had to largest cabin of all on the other side of Syaoran. The corridor that ran around the outside was all steel grating and metal walls, criss-crossed with wiring; luckily to tell the rooms apart Sakura had painted decals on the cabin doors. Hers was of a pretty cherry blossom, Syaoran's was of a pair of goggles. Kurogane got a tangled Japanese-style dragon painted in silver, its red eyes glaring malevolently out at the corridor. Yuui thought it was apt, if excessive.

There were shared bathroom facilities on the other side of his cabin, and between the bathroom and Kurogane's cabin, completing the circle, was the rec room; it was larger by far than his cabin and contained cooking facilities, a television, even a shelf of worn battered electronic book libraries. Sakura confessed with a grin that Syaoran was an avid reader, and the five-six devices contained hundreds of thousands of books in their databanks. "And of course, if you want anything after that, you can always ask Mokona to get it for you," she said.

"Mokona?" Yuui said. "I thought that was the ship's name?"

"I forgot you were from Earth for a second," she said, giggling, and clapped her hands together, calling out in a voice that carried across the empty rec room, "Mokona, attention!"

A computer terminal next to the television blinked on, a cartoon figure of a curious rabbit-like creature appearing on its screen. It waddled into the centre of the screen and executed a bow.

"An AI?" Yuui asked, and she nodded.

"Mokona, this is Fai-san," she said. "He'll be our guest from here to Europa. Why don't you say hello?"

"Hello," the shipboard AI said in a monotonous tone. "I am Artificial Intelligence unit Em Zero Kay Zero En Aye, registered to -"

"Not that!" Sakura said, waving her hand. "Tell him what you can do."

"My primary directive is to assist in management of shipboard navigational tasks," Mokana said in the same wooden voice. Yuui tilted his head to one side; he had met car AIs with more spark than this one. Perhaps Kurogane objected to his AI having such a thing as a personality. He certainly seemed to object to people who had one. "I am also a fully programmable personal assistant and can provide a wide range of aid with daily human life."

"I see," said Yuui, a little unnerved.

Sakura must have caught some of this, because she said, in a quiet voice, "The captain is a little old-fashioned when it comes to AI units. He took out her personality core."

"Ah," said Yuui, wrinkling his nose. That _was _old fashioned. A lot of older folks tended to neuter their AIs the same way; when they'd started trying to build personalities into AIs the initial results had been really bad, and humanity generally refused to adapt. Before he could comment on this, though, his stomach rumbled, and Sakura raised her eyebrows and grinned.

"Oh dear," she said. "Shall we see what there is to eat, Fai-san?"

"Please," he said, flushing, and she just smiled at him gently and led him over to the cooking corner.

"Most of the equipment here is really old," she said apologetically, bending down to rummage through a cupboard and thus unable to see the covetous way Yuui ran his eyes over the cooking implements, the pans and pots and tools, the racks of herbs and spices and the big metal food storage unit. It was a fully functional kitchen and he could already see the things he could _do _with it. "We have enough food here to last about one Earth standard year, but by the ninth month we'd probably be down to the bare essentials, so we'll be stocking up on Mars. We're growing a lot more food now than we used to," she said proudly. "Have you ever eaten Martian food?"

He shook his head. As far as he knew Earth sold food _to _Mars, which didn't have much in the way of agriculture.

"It's very spicy," she said, pulling out a plastic container with what looked like dumplings inside it. "But really nice. Oh... we don't have anything but chopsticks onboard, I can teach you how to -"

"I know how to use chopsticks," he said, amused.

"You do? But you're not Martian..."

"I grew up in what used to be Asia," he said, taking the pair she handed him and wielding them expertly to prove his point. "The area that supplied the first Martian colonies? I'm sure I'll be okay."

She showed him how to use the microwave, which thanked him enthusiastically for his time and apologized for taking so long to cook his food, and they sat together at the metal countertop as he ate, minding his manners although he was hungry enough he could have eaten with his fingers. Sakura made herself a cup of green tea, drinking it out of a plastic cup with a special lid attachment; when he raised his eyebrows at it she lifted it and said, "This outer ring has gravity, but the engine room doesn't, so I guess I got into the habit of having my drinks with zero-grav protection. Have I told you about the engine room yet?"

Her eyes were sparkling, so he shook his head and watched her with interest that wasn't really all that feigned as she launched into a discussion about the great engine at the heart of the ship that provided everything they needed - power, air, gravity for the living quarters. He knew why the gravity was necessary - humans had found out centuries ago the damage living in zero gravity could do to the human body - but he hadn't realized how _fragile _the whole system was.

Before he could let himself get sidetracked with the scary possibilities of that thought, the door slid open and the teenage boy - Syaoran - came into the rec room while he was still finishing off the dumplings; his flight suit was unbuttoned at the neck, and he wore heavy spacer boots that clanked over the floor. His whole face lit up when he saw Sakura, and suddenly the dumplings tasted like ash on Yuui's tongue; he missed Fai suddenly, not the Fai in the crate but the Fai who had looked at him like that as they made love on the roof of their apartment block, their fingers tangled together and his twin so warm against him.

"Hello, Fai-san," Syaoran said politely, and Yuui forced himself to flash that fake smile again. Syaoran responded to it, tilting his head to one side and smiling back. His face was open and honest; his clear eyes were bright and warm. "We're almost ready to go. We're thinking of taking the route by the moon, keep clear of the major shipping lanes. Do you think that's a good idea, princess?"

"Oh, stop it," Sakura said, blushing. "I'm not a _princess_."

"You are to me," Syaoran said seriously, and they were making eyes at each other again for a few seconds before Yuui let his chopsticks click against his plate loud enough to snap them out of it. Sakura coughed and rubbed her hands over her cheeks; Syaoran fidgeted and looked slightly embarrassed himself.

"I think we'll be fine," she said. "I don't have a bad feeling about that route."

There was something going on with that exchange Yuui sensed he didn't understand, some kind of code he wasn't privy to, but he didn't comment on it, just kept smiling. Syaoran slid into one of the seats at the counter next to him, his hands neat on the metal surface.

"The captain's on the warpath today," he said conversationally. "It might be best if you kept to your room, Fai-san."

"You mean that's not how Captain Grump normally treats his guests?" Yuui asked, and Syaoran rubbed a hand over his mouth and shook his head.

"It's not like Fai-san's room is that large," Sakura said, frowning. "Especially not with that crate in it. It's not fair to expect him to stay there. Why is the captain so angry?"

"I don't know," Syaoran said uncomfortably. "He isn't usually like this, he's just... "

"Cranky," Sakura supplied.

Yuui traced a finger in spirals around his plate. He wondered if maybe the captain was angry because of him; maybe he was pissed at having to go so far out of his way to drop Yuui off. Well, tough to be him; Yuui had paid him. Maybe he just needed to get on Kurogane's good side. He wasn't entirely sure how to go about doing that, making friends was never something he'd learned, but...

_Just smile, baby._

Well, if nothing else, there was always sex. The possibility didn't thrill him, but Kurogane seemed kind of like a bully, and bullies always liked to be in control. If things got bad he could always offer himself up; they liked that, liked having people plead. The thought filled him with a dull sort of terror - nobody had ever touched him intimately except Fai, he didn't really want to start now - but he knew he'd do it, if it kept the captain from hurting him or Fai.

It wasn't like he had anything else to offer, and... it might not be such a hardship. There was something about those red eyes, the way they looked at him... Yuui breathed out slowly. No. No, there was no point dwelling on this now.

"If you'd show me how to clean up, I'd like to see the engine before we leave," he said with a smile, and Sakura lit up.

Well, at least two of his travelling companions were nice. He hoped he could win the third over, too, in time. Using whatever means necessary. He didn't really know how to go about seducing someone for favors, but he thought he could figure it out.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	7. 6: it's not quite paradise

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapter five was mostly written by Reikah, and chapter six was mostly written by me._

A clarification regarding currency: Since near-Earth space was settled first by the Japanese, then later by a Chinese-European confederation, the standard unit of currency was originally based on the yen. The Westerners had difficulty adapting to it, so they started referring to new units of a hundred yen each - yenbucks, or _yebs_ for short, and it eventually became the standard currency of solar space.

* * *

><p>They were underway. <em>Finally. <em>The Station had been reluctant to give them the all-clear - some sort of security drill or something going down on the earth-side - but Kurogane had bribed the head of their tower control more times over the years than the woman was comfortable letting her bosses know. After a pointed reminder of this fact she chose let them go with minimal fuss, which was the way Kurogane liked it.

Syaoran had gone to find Sakura and check her opinion on the route they had taken, and Mokona told him she'd found him in the rec room, with the engineer and their weasel of a guest. Kurogane told her to send him up to the cockpit, and waited irritably for the kid to turn up. It took him longer than he would have preferred, and worse, Sakura brought the blond liar up with her.

"This is the control room," she said, hovering in the doorway, keeping both herself and their passenger out of the way. "It's where -"

"It's not a fucking museum," Kurogane interrupted, and she frowned at him. Syaoran paused, sliding on his holo-goggles, the ones that displayed data from the nose cameras and allowed him to manipulate the ship easier. "You're in the way, shorty," Kurogane added.

"I have a name, Captain Cranky," said the moron, as though this were all one big game.

"His name is _Fai_," Sakura added reproachfully, and Kurogane grunted in disdain.

"Don't care," he said. "Get out of the way."

"If you won't use my name I won't use yours, Captain Tightpants," said the pest, and was he _leering_at Kurogane? What the fuck?

"It's _Kurogane_," Kurogane growled, but the idiot just smirked at him, and he sighed and ran his hands through his hair. "Sit down, shut up, and don't touch anything," he ordered, and the man did, taking the abandoned copilot's chair right as the comm link burst to life.

"This is the Mokona, leaving from the South docks from the locker area," said Syaoran. "Release gravity and initiate depressurization."

"Roger that Mokona, releasing gravity," said the dock control, and Kurogane, Syaoran and Sakura breathed out simultaneously, waiting for the pressure to adjust; Sakura pinched her nose and sealed her lips shut, exhaling as hard as she could to make her ears pop. The liar obviously hadn't expected it and his fingers tightened hard on the edge of the chair.

There was a _whump _that shook the floor under their feet as their engine kick started; the lights on the console began to shine brighter, and Mokona's little rabbit avatar began to solidify as the display switched from 2d to 3d. Syaoran curled his fingers around the control stick and said to her, "Initiate full pre-launch checks."

"Initiating," she said. "Checks complete. You are in the green."

"Earth's Eurasia orbital platform hopes to see you again," added tower control.

"Hopefully not," said their passenger under his breath, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes at the man. He'd been thinking the same thing, but he wasn't from Earth.

Syaoran took them out of the dock slowly, going carefully to avoid brushing the edges of the ship against the hatch doors. He was a damn good pilot, probably one of the best Kurogane had; he had a steady, deft touch, and the ship behaved beautifully under his control. They were out before the engines had finished warming up.

"Good," said Kurogane curtly. He didn't believe in inflating heads with unnecessary praise. "Alright, set us on the lunar course. Unless the mechanic disagreed?"

"No, it felt right to me," she said. "If you'll excuse me, I'm going to check the engine, keep an eye on the right thruster."

She left through the doors with one parting glance at 'Fai' - if that was even his name - who was sitting there, his hands tense and white-knuckled on the armrests of the copilot's chair, his eyes wide and round. The hair dye and contacts he'd gained since Kurogane had first met him made his skin look sallow to begin with, but Kurogane thought he was somehow even paler than he had been.

The display had been one of the things that drew Kurogane to this particular ship; he had liked the option to see where he was going. It was unnecessary, of course; even in his time ships had forward cameras that broadcast images across screens for viewing, but it was a visual aesthetic he had liked. Right now they had a great view of white, grey and dirty Earth directly in front of them; the south side docks opened pointing downward. Kurogane let his upper lip curl back from his teeth in dislike.

"We probably won't crash," he said casually, watching the man. Fai swallowed, and smiled; it was a pretty smile, a charming smile, and it lit up his face and made him look almost attractive. It was also utterly false, and Kurogane scowled at him. Did he think he was fooling anybody with it?

"Well, that's good," said Fai tightly.

"I mean, I've been travelling around for a while now, I haven't crashed," Kurogane continued. "Obviously I avoid this scumsucking planet when I can, though."

"Spoken like a true spacer," said Fai.

"Yeah, well. Forgive me if I hate how Earthlings treat human life."

"Oh?" Fai was watching him warily now, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes at the blond. "I wasn't aware Earth had a reputation for being careless with its people," Fai continued, and Kurogane rolled his eyes.

"I have better things to do than play 'welcome to the universe' with you," he said, coldly, and saw the way the idiot flinched. He was scared, scared of something, and somehow his cowardice annoyed Kurogane more. As if his occupation weren't offensive enough. "Get out of my hair," he said. "Go to the rec room or something. Don't bother me here."

The man's eyes flashed and his mouth thinned, but all he said was, "As you say, Captain Surly."

So there was some fight in him, Kurogane thought as Fai got up and went. Too bad he was slaver scum.

Half an hour later Kurogane stretched in the captain's chair, glad that he had spared the time and expense to remodel the cockpit and chair to a size he could comfortably move around in. Space was tight on any ship as small as this one, but since he lived here practically all the time, it was worth it. He rubbed the tight muscles on the back of his neck and glared at the display, seeing nothing but the blackness of space.

If he was being honest with himself, part of what was gritting his gears here was his own sense of disappointment. When he'd met their passenger in the spacer bar, he never would have taken him for a slave-runner - he was too much an amateur at space travel and regular shipping, let alone the underbelly of the trade, and he was obviously running scared of something. Kurogane's curiosity had been piqued, his intellect engaged by a job for the first time in months - years - as he wondered what the blond man had been hiding. What his secrets were.

And he'd been intrigued by the man himself, he had to admit; so obviously fake and plastic on the outside, who knew what layers he might be hiding underneath? Kurogane had been looking forward to the challenge of figuring him out, of getting to see the real man underneath the disguise.

He shook his head in disgust, as much at himself as with his passenger, and rubbed his hand over his face. But his secrets had turned out to be all too disgustingly common a vice; selfish greed, the absolute lowest point to which a criminal could demean himself in order to make a few yebs profit.

As soon as he'd seen the crate, its size had clued him in to what its mere description hadn't; two and a half meters by one on each side, it was just the size of the cryonic cages that slavers used to transport prisoners. Too much bother to feed them during a journey, it was much easier just to slap them into coffins and pack them in sardine-like rows for transit. Once he'd known what to look for, Mokona had alerted him as soon as Fai stepped onto the ship of the syringes and tranq shots hidden in his jacket; he wondered how the hell the man had gotten them through the security checkpoints if he couldn't even disguise them from a simple scan.

He would have liked to call the station cops on the guy right then, or better yet, just draw his sword and administer some old-style justice; but it was too risky to get involved with the Earth authorities in any form. Nor would it accomplish much to scare the slaverunner off into the main station, where he might score passage on some other ship. No, it was better just to keep quiet until the man and his cargo were safely on board and at Kurogane's mercy, and they were out of Earth's jurisdiction and safely in international space.

Like now.

Kurogane inhaled deeply, then stood from the captain's chair. "Mokona, get our heading locked in for Deimos-alpha," he said. "Make whatever gravitational changes you have to, and set an alarm for twelve hours proximity."

"Acknowledged," the disembodied female voice came, and Kurogane strode out of the control chamber towards the rec room.

The slaver - Fai was his name, Kurogane remembered unwillingly. Sakura and Syaoran had already had a chance to talk with him, and Sakura was the type to befriends rats and pigeons if left to herself. Damn, he hoped she hadn't taken a liking to their passenger; he didn't deserve it. Fai was seated in the galley with his back to the door, draped halfway over the counter as he stared off into their spice cabinet. He straightened up and turned at the sound of Kurogane's footsteps, though, and put on that bright, oh-so-fake smile that didn't fool Kurogane for a minute.

"Look, it's Captain Snappy!" the man chirped, and Kurogane scowled.

"Cut it with the cute nicknames," he growled. "We're on our way to Mars; we should be out of Earth's jurisdiction now, not that they don't overreach it all the time anyway."

The stranger let out half a breath then, and his posture relaxed; Kurogane noticed with interest that he could tell much more by watching the man's body language than his face.

"How long to Mars?" the man wanted to know.

"Ten days," Kurogane said shortly. He wondered if the slaver realized just what that meant; that he was wholly in Kurogane's hands now.

"Ooh, what a long time to spend in boring space," Fai said, although he didn't sound particularly concerned. He stood up, still smiling, and came a few steps towards Kurogane. The captain watched him narrowly, trying to judge his intentions. Surely he wasn't going to try a mid-space hijack? The thought was ludicrous. "And how do you normally… entertain yourself during all those empty hours?"

"However you want," Kurogane snorted. "It's got nothing to do with me."

"Really?" Fai asked in a coy and teasing tone. He took another couple of steps, right into Kurogane's personal space, and he felt a sudden inexplicable urge to retreat. How was this guy getting under his skin? Narrowing his glare, he stood his ground. He was armed, and this guy wasn't.

Instead of attacking, though, the blond man, lowered his gaze and raised one hand to trail across his chest. "You don't do anything fun?" he purred. "I can think of lots of fun things you could do with me…"

"Get off me," Kurogane growled, suddenly disgusted as he realized what the man was trying to imply. He tried to shove Fai backwards, but the guy was faster than he looked, and managed to avoid his hands.

"You shouldn't be so standoffish, Captain Prude," Fai said, dancing back with a laugh. "After all, it's just going to be the four of us together on this boat for months! We should get to know each other better, ne?"

Kurogane clenched his teeth, feeling anger burning in his chest at the blond idiot's forwardness - the more so because he really was attractive. Or at least he would have been, if he weren't as slimy as a septic tank on the inside. Enough of this charade.

"Only four?" Kurogane drawled, setting one hand on his hip as he took a step forward, crowding Fai towards the bulkhead. "Sure you haven't miscounted?"

That fake, plastic smile faltered for a moment, a brief look of panic passing over his face before the smile reappeared. "Well, I suppose it's five if you count Mokona," he said with a little laugh, "but she's not really a person, is she? Not since her personality core was removed, anyway."

"I'm not talking about the computer," Kurogane growled darkly; where the fuck did he get off criticizing Kurogane for how he handled his own ship's computer? He took another step forward, and Fai bumped against the wall as he tried to back away. Kurogane leaned forward into his personal space. "I'm talking about your guest. Whoever it is that you've got packed away in that carton in your cabin."

Kurogane watched in satisfaction as the liar's grin froze and crumbled. The bastard actually tried to make a break for it, darting around Kurogane towards the door - where did the idiot think he was going to go on a sealed spaceship? Kurogane grabbed him and slammed him back against the bulkhead with almost contemptuous ease.

"Do you think I'm an idiot, slaver scum?" Kurogane snarled, his red eyes burning into Fai's with the force of his glare. "That I wouldn't figure out just what 'fragile cargo' fits in a man-size box and can't be stored in vacuum? I know what tranq darts look like, I've seen them in use before! Or did you assume that because I was a smuggler, I'd be a filthy slave-hauler like you?"

"No," Fai wheezed, trying to pry Kurogane's hands away from his throat. "It's not - it's not like that - I'm not -"

But Kurogane in no mood to listen to a liar's pathetic excuses, and slammed the guy back against the wall hard enough to make him see stars. "Who've you got in the box?" he demanded. "Slave labor, some poor senseless kinetic or talent that they want out on the outer colonies? Or some poor pretty face that you're selling to some rich perverted scumlord to be their toy?"

The blond writhed against the bulkhead, gasping for air, and Kurogane released him with a shove. Stupid little shrimp - he was so light and skinny that Kurogane could practically lift him with one hand. Probably spent his life doing paperwork in some office somewhere - what on earth had possessed him to come out in the field to do his own dirty work?

He took a step back and reached down to his hip, unsheathing Ginryuu, the arcane katana that he carried with him everywhere. This particular class of weapon had been adapted from the ancient designs to channel anything from a shock charge to a laser-strong cutting force that could slice through metal and concrete like butter. It wasn't turned on - it was nothing more than a dull stick at the moment, but it was sufficient to make his point; he placed the tip of it under Fai's chin and forced him to lift his head up to meet his eyes.

"If there's one thing I hate worse than Earthies who think they're the lords of the universe," he spat, "It's the filthy scum like you who thinks they're so much better than other people that they're just things to you! People who treat lives as though they're things that can be bought and sold - you are the kind of person I despise most in the universe!"

"You took a contract -" Fai objected feebly. "You promised -"

"Oh, I always honor my contracts," Kurogane said. He dropped the tip of the katana and Fai sagged in relief, but then Kurogane's hand shot out and gripped his upper arm, hard enough to bruise. "I took your payment, and I'm bound to deliver one passenger to Europa. I figure we'll drop off your captive on Europa - or wherever else they want to go - and you, slaver scum, can lighten our load by taking a short walk out our airlock." He pulled the other man away from the wall and started towards the door, intent on dragging the liar with him to the guest cabin to reveal the truth. If the scum thought they were headed for the airlock instead, that was fine by him.

"No!" The cry erupted from Fai's throat, and he twisted like a monkey to free himself from Kurogane's grasp. The next moment, an invisible wall of force hit Kurogane like a tidal wave; for all his weight and solid stance he found himself flying through the air like a rag doll and slammed hard against the opposite wall. For a moment he thought the invisible force would crush him to jelly, but then the pressure abated and his vision cleared enough to see Fai on the other side of the room, hand outspread and eyes huge.

A kinetic! Damn it all, the man was one of Earth's elite agents! How had they cracked his codes, gotten on to him? Had one of his former clients betrayed him? "Bastard!" Kurogane roared, tendons standing out on his skin as he strained futilely against the invisible force. "You're - one of their damn dogs!"

"Captain!" A new voice called out from the other end of the room, and Fai whipped his head around as Syaoran rushed into the galley, his own weapon in hand. "What's going on? I heard shouting, and -"

Fai turned halfway towards Syaoran, and Kurogane fought to free himself in the hopes that his attention would slip - but it was no use. The kinetic's free hand jerked out towards Syaoran and twisted up, and the unpowered sword ripped its way out of the teenager's hands and embedded itself with a quivering thud in the plastic panels of the ceiling. Syaoran exclaimed in shock, lurching forward to reach for his weapon, before another wave of invisible force sent him crashing against the wall of the chamber opposite.

For a moment the tableau hung there, Fai panting as he stood with both his arms outstretched, his two captives struggling against the unseen force pinning them in place. "Captain? What's happening?" Syaoran said in a panic. "Fai-sa-? _Who are you?_"

"He's a kinetic - he's one of earth's special police forces," Kurogane snarled, seething in his own captivity. "Graduates of that god damned elite academy -"

"I don't work for them," Fai said hoarsely, shaking his head. "I won't let anyone use us, I won't let anyone hurt us again! I don't work for anyone!"

_Oh, bullshit! _Kurogane seethed, as he tried to work his hand towards his weapon. If he could activate it - throw it -

"I believe you," a new voice said calmly.

Fai jerked his head around to face the newcomer, and Kurogane grunted as the invisible hand holding him tightened. "Sakura, get out of it," he growled, at the same time Fai's shaky voice said "Stay back!"

Sakura ignored them both as she stepped into the rec cabin, walking calmly forward with her empty hands stretched out before her. Her green eyes were wide and earnest, and her voice was calm, soothing.

"Not everyone who's a telekinetic works for Earth's army; you should know that, Captain," she said. "And not all of the espers who work for them do it because they want to, isn't that right?"

"I don't -" Fai said, and lurched as he staggered a step backwards, trying to turn to face Sakura while keeping the other two in his sights. "Just leave me alone!"

"I know what it's like to have people come after you for what they think you can do," Sakura told him softly. She stopped a few paces away from him, and deliberately knelt down on the floor, making herself small and unthreatening as she looked up at him. "Because the same thing happened to me."

"You? You're a..." Fai whispered uncertainly, lowering his arms slightly. Kurogane shifted, trying to take advantage of his inattention, and grunted as he felt the invisible band snap tightly back into place again.

Sakura didn't take her eyes off him for a second. "I started manifesting when I hit puberty," she said quietly. "Things I saw that I couldn't explain, dreams that happened the same way every night."

"You're a precognitive?" Fai gasped, eyes wide with disbelief - as well he might. The existence of those rarest of espers who could see the future was widely known, but they were so uncommon he'd probably never met one before. "So - that's why they were asking you if you had any 'feelings' about the route!"

Sakura's mouth twisted in a wry smile as her voice became bitter. "I don't always know if something bad is coming," she said, "or I should have found some way to hide myself. I still don't know how they found out about me - what exactly it was that flagged me in their system - but when I was fourteen, the Feds staged a raid on our home, and dragged me out of my bed at midnight. They stuffed me in the back of a lift-van with no windows, and I've never seen my home again since then."

"They didn't -" Fai's eyes darted to Syaoran, then to Kurogane, and Sakura shook her head quickly.

"No! It wasn't them," she said with heavy emphasis. "Syaoran, he was my friend in Clow Colony, we grew up together. He came after me - he helped free me - " she looked over at the teenager, and her eyes warmed and softened. Then Sakura looked over at Kurogane, including him in the warmth.

"And Kurogane took us both in, gave us a home and a life," Sakura finished quietly. "So you see, they're both good people, and they won't try to enslave or hurt you."

She took another slow step forward, and Fai shivered as she reached up and gently placed her hand on the side of his face. "Whatever you're running from, or running towards, we can help you," she said, her voice soft, encouraging. "But you have to let the others go now. I promise they won't try to attack you again."

"We won't?" Kurogane grumbled from behind him, then hissed as Fai's mental grasp tightened.

"No, I think we've had enough of shouting and threatening and tossing people around," Sakura said, giving Kurogane a severe look. "You started it, didn't you?"

Kurogane grumbled something under his breath, but didn't reply. It would have been pretty disingenuous of him to try, given that he was still holding part of the sleeve from Fai's shirt from where it had ripped off when Fai threw him against the wall.

"Um, I don't know what's happening," Syaoran put in nervously. "I was just coming to defend the Captain. But I promise I won't try to attack you or anything, Fai-san. But you can't keep us here forever. Besides, if you kill us, who will pilot the ship?"

Fai hesitated a long moment in indecision, but there was really no decision to make. Slowly, his muscles tense, he lowered his hands and relaxed the force of his mental holds. Kurogane grunted as he regained his balance - Syaoran actually dropped a couple of inches to the floor. "I'm not a slaver," he said in low, tense tones. "I'm not. That's what we're - what I'm trying to get him away from."

"Him who?" Syaoran wanted to know. Fai shivered, and shook his head convulsively. Kurogane's patience, already stretched to the limit, tightened forward. That was _it, _no more of this bullshit running and hiding.

"You said you'd show me," Kurogane said in an even tone, but a surly undertone remained, and his eyes were hard. He came to stand by Fai's elbows, and the kinetic gasped and shrank away from him. "Once we got underway, you promised to show me what this was all about."

"I... yes." His eyes dropped. His voice was reluctant and unhappy, but that was just _too damned bad, _ he'd lied his way onto Kurogane's ship and dragged his trouble with him and knocked him against the bloody _wall; _Kurogane was in no mood to humor him.

"Come on," Sakura said. She took his hand between both of her soft ones, and smiled at him. "Why don't you introduce us?"

Trailed by the rest of the crew of the Mokona, Fai led the way back to his tiny, cramped cabin. The man-size carton was still there, taking up most of the floor space - Fai could barely wedge his skinny legs around it. The other three hovered out in the corridor, watching intently.

Fai began the tedious process of stripping away the enclosing plastic and foam, the specially-lined sheets that had protected it from scanners. He bunched the strips of plastic aside on his bunk, unsure what else to do with them, until Syaoran reached forward and took them from him.

"I'll put these in the recycle," he assured Fai quietly. "They'll break it back down into polymers to use for something else."

Fai nodded jerkily and took a deep breath as he turned back to strip the final coating away. A blast of warm air blew past Kurogane into the hallway as the exhaust port was uncovered, and the glass viewing port of the triage chamber slowly began to unfog.

He heard Sakura and Syaoran gasp as a man's sleeping face came into view - lying as though dead in a glass coffin. Kurogane's own attention abruptly sharpened as he recognized the features and coloring - he was a dead ringer for the man he'd met in the space bar two days earlier. As soon as his passenger stripped off the rest of his disguise, he was sure, the two would be identical.

"He's - exactly the same," Syaoran exclaimed in astonishment. "Is he a clone? Your clone, I mean?"

"He's not a clone, kid," Kurogane said sharply. "Look at them - they're the same age." Everyone knew that clones started out as infants, the same as any natural-born human, and took the same number of years to develop to adulthood.

"Oh - I see, you're right," Syaoran said in a more subdued voice. "But, what then?"

"Twins," Sakura said in a hushed whisper. "It is rare, but it does happen sometimes... but... what happened to him?"

A heavy, painful-looking bruise ringed the sleeper's eye, and smaller bruises - yet no less ominous - tracked around the wrist and up the arm that was visible through the port. Kurogane felt his own anger receding, replaced with a kind of sympathetic horror; this one had been as much the victim of Earth's atrocities as Kurogane ever had.

"I don't know," Fai ground out from between gritted jaws, "what the feds wanted him for. And I don't _care_what they wanted."

He had to stop and take several deep breaths, gulping against his unsteady voice. "But I'm never going to let them have him again. Never! I'll run to the furthest end of the galaxy if I have to, I'll kill whoever they send after me but I'm not ever going to let them hurt him again!"

His words rang in the tiny cabin, and Fai slid down in the tight space between the cold chamber and the wall. He folded his arms across the top of the glass plate and dropped his head on them, his shoulders shaking.

"Fai-san…" Sakura began, stepping forward with her hand raised compassionately.

"I'm not," he interrupted her, his voice ragged and thick.

"What?" she asked in confusion. He turned his head, his eyes glistening from behind a curtain of disarrayed hair.

"I'm not… Fai," he said. "I'm sorry. I lied about that because I was afraid you'd recognize my name from the wanted bulletin."

Kurogane grunted in realization; he'd seen the alert on TV, of course, but had not paid sufficient attention to the pictures to connect it with his passenger. What business was it of his if Earth couldn't catch their own downsider terrorists? Syaoran and Sakura, of course, had been too wrapped up in resupply - and each other - and didn't have much interest in the news in the first place.

"What should we call you, then?" Syaoran asked tentatively.

The skinny man turned back to the triage capsule, a look of painful longing gripping his expression as he stroked his fingers across the clear plastic port. "My name is Yuui," he said quietly. "_He's _Fai."

"I'll go reprogram the life support for five people, then," Syaoran said quietly, and his footsteps traced away. Sakura's light feet stepped forward into his cabin, hesitated, then she reached out and patted him on the shoulder. "He'll be okay, Yuui-san," she whispered, before she retreated. Kurogane stood there, jaw working, searching for words. He'd never been a man of words.

At last Yuui roused enough to raise his head; his face was red and tear-streaked, and he rubbed at his contact-tinted eyes. "What," he said in a flat, thick voice. "What do you want."

Kurogane leaned against the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest. "Was any of that broadcast true?" he said quietly. "Blew up an installation, killed three hundred people?"

A haunted look washed over Fai's - Yuui's - face, and he dropped his eyes back to the capsule. That look alone told Kurogane most of what he was after; whether he'd done it or not, he hadn't wanted to, and thus wasn't likely to do it again on his ship.

"It was… I never meant to…" Yuui mumbled, his hands rubbing unconsciously together. "I had to get him out… they had him in the most guarded part of the complex. If I could have gotten to him some other way, I - you didn't see him, you didn't see what they were doing to him -"

"Hey." Kurogane interrupted his rambling monologue. Some of the things he was saying twinged unpleasantly close to home for Kurogane, but that wasn't something he was about to get into with a stranger. "It's none of my business. I just want to know if you're going to be a problem on my ship. If you hurt either of the kids, I'll cut you down, kinetic or no."

"I understand," Yuui whispered, avoiding Kurogane's eyes.

Kurogane paused for a moment, thinking of how to say it. "Look. When we stop by Mars, we'll look into getting whatever medical supplies you - he needs," he said. "Lighten up. Whatever happens, we'll protect you both."

He turned and walked away, feeling Yuui's incredulous stare on his back. It wasn't really much of an apology for the way he had manhandled the guy and thrown him around, but he wasn't really good with apologies. He'd just have to show Yuui - and his brother - the fact of the matter; he was on Kurogane's ship now, and Kurogane protected what belonged to him. He would protect them and help them no matter what horrors lay in their past or waited in their future.

* * *

><p>~to be continued.<p> 


	8. 7: but at least it feels like home

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Also, don't bother looking up the drugs named in this chapter; they're not accurate._

A clarification regarding measurements: A decimeter (dm) is 1/10th of a meter, or 10 centimeters (about the length of your palm.) In this time or place, it has been widely adopted in place of feet and inches.

* * *

><p>This was going to take some getting used to.<p>

Yuui stood at the bottom of the ladder leading upwards to his room on the ship, one hand on the rungs for reassurance. Upwards was, of course, a relative direction; Sakura had explained it to him, and Syaoran had shown him a schematic of the Mokona, but it was hard to translate a shape on paper into reality.

The basic shape of the ship - like many others of its size and class - was an oblong cylinder, wider at the back than at the tip. Streamers of cargo pods trailed along in obedient tow from the bow of the ship, well clear of the thrusters, giving the appearance of fins or ears of some aquatic creature. The power plant and engine array ran down the core of the cylinder, with steering thrusters at the edges and a main acceleration cannon at the back. When the ship was in flight it generated its own gravity; _down_ was always towards the engine, running along the center of the ship, and _up_ was… any direction away.

The main hallway was a torus that ran around the inner ring of the core, and the various rooms and storage spaces were another, larger ring around that. Which meant that to get to his room, like any of the others, he had to climb 'up' through the hatch from the central hallway. It also meant, Yuui realized with a faint queasiness, that he could _see_ the curve of the hallway as it arced along the central ring. His room was small enough that the arc wasn't apparent but out here in the corridor the ceiling, the walls, and the floor all shared the same gentle twist.

From where he stood, the carpeted floor appeared to slope off downhill in both directions under his feet, and Yuui couldn't help the nervous sensation that if he tripped he would tumble unstoppably along that slope. And yet when he finally worked up the nerve to walk down that carpet, his feet and inner ear told him that he was walking along a perfectly smooth, level hallway.

Except of course, that if he walked forward in a straight line without turning for half a mile, he would fetch up exactly where he'd started.

_Weird._

Neither of the teenagers nor the Captain seemed to pay any attention to the unnerving warp of the walls and floor, nor to the stomach-turning ninety-degree flip that the gravity made when they climbed onto the control room situated on the 'nose' of the ship. But then, they were all space-born - the kids from Mars, by their own admission, and the captain from God knew where, except that he'd made clear his disdain for all earthly things.

Including Yuui.

He pushed that thought away, instead grasping for some kind of optimism. The truth was out, and against all expectation these three spacers had accepted him. They had promised to help him and protect him, and more importantly, help _Fai._

At least Kurogane no longer thought he was a… he couldn't help but flinch at the mortifying thought. Had the captain really thought Yuui was some kind of slave merchant? On the other hand, if a hardened smuggler like Kurogane could be so disgusted and angry by the prospect… lawless the world Yuui had escaped into might be, but this man at least still had some kind of iron-hard ethics.

And as for the younger ones… they both radiated an innocence that Yuui found hard to accept, given their situation. Had he and Fai ever been that trusting, that optimistic, that happy? If so, he couldn't remember it. It was clear that Kurogane looked after his young crewmembers in ways that no adult had ever looked after him and his brother; and being around their open-hearted friendliness was a balm for Yuui's frayed nerves and battered heart.

With those encouraging thoughts in mind Yuui took a deep breath, let go of the ladder, and stepped forward. It was tricky, and he kept stumbling; his eyes insisted that he should be stepping down, only to find solid ground where he thought he should find open air. Eventually he just shut his eyes and walked straight forward, letting his body find its natural balance.

"Oh -"

Of course, walking down the middle of the hallway with his eyes closed had its disadvantages, Yuui realized as he collided with a smaller, warm body and sent them both bouncing towards opposite walls. His eyes flew open and he steadied himself with an instinctive use of his power, then quickly reached out and grabbed Sakura before she could skin her knees on the carpet. "Sorry!" he gasped.

"Fai-s - I mean, Yuui-san!" she corrected herself hastily, clutching a sheaf of documents against her chest. Her carafe of coffee had flown out of her hands at the impact, but fortunately its lid prevented more than a few drops from leaking steadily onto the floor. Yuui retrieved it for her and handed it to her right-side up. "I'm sorry, I almost didn't recognize you… your hair…"

"What? Oh," Yuui said, automatically putting a hand up as though to check that his hair was still in place. "Yes, the - the dark color was just a disguise to get me through the spaceport." He'd washed it out in the bathroom earlier, somewhat awkwardly; it was his first time dealing with shipboard facilities. On the up side it was startlingly clean, almost sterile; on the down side, there was not much space and even less free-running water. He'd taken out the contacts, too, although he kept those in case he ever needed again.

"It's pretty," Sakura said. She sounded almost entranced, and Yuui wondered if she'd met many natural blonds before; as he recalled, Mars had been mostly settled by east and southeastern Asians. "That's your natural color, isn't it? I mean, it was the same as… your brother…"

Impulsively she reached out to touch his hair, and Yuui's first shocked impulse was to jerk away. He didn't usually let strangers into his personal space, let alone fool around with his _hair._ But after the first touch, he felt himself oddly pinned - Sakura wasn't really a stranger, was she? They were crewmates and besides, she was kind; her touch felt more like… Fai, stroking affectionately over the crown of his head when they dozed together.

He swallowed against a lump in his throat, and tried to smile for her. "Anyway, I am sorry about nearly knocking you down," he said.

"Yes, why _were_ you walking along with your eyes closed?" she said with a giggle.

He laughed sheepishly. "Well, I'm just - I'm trying to get used to the gravity here," he said. "What my eyes see and what my body feels just don't match up."

"Really?" She tilted her head. "I guess I'm just so used to it, but - didn't you do any training in low-gee and null-gee environments, back on Earth?"

"Oh, yes," he said, memories coming back to him at her words. There were bad things lurking in those memories, but the gravity training itself had usually been good. His instructors had been other kinetics, not the paper-pushers who conducted the other training courses, and it had been _fun. _"But there was never anything like this. Besides, it's been a while - I'm afraid I'm getting out of practice."

"Moving in zero-gee, you mean?" Sakura was beginning to get excited, "You know, the engine room is always in zero-gee. If you wanted, you could go in there to train!"

"Oh no, I couldn't - I'd get in your way, and I might hit something -" he began, shocked.

"Not at all!" she countered his protests. "There's LOTS of room, and everything is so sturdy - you'd have to hit it _really _hard to damage it. Come on, it will be fun! I've always loved watching zero-gee dancers!"

"Well… if you're really sure…" Maybe he should have protested more, but honestly, the prospect was appealing. After the physical and mental strain of yesterday, he could really use some harmless exercise to relax. And besides, he missed freefall. The gravity on the station had been somewhat less than earth-normal - whether due to its altitude above the planet, or artificially induced, he wasn't sure - but it just wasn't the same. He never felt so free as when he was in null-gee.

"All right," he said with a smile. "Lead the way."

* * *

><p>Kurogane paused with his hand on the ladder descending into the engine room. He heard voices down there, and not the ones he was expecting. There was Sakura's familiar piping, but the other voice was neither Syaoran's light tenor nor Mokona's flat monotone. It took him a few moments to place the unfamiliar tone; it was Fai-or-Yuui, whatever the hell his name was, their passenger. What the hell was he doing in the engine room?<p>

Curiosity warring with annoyance, Kurogane turned and started climbing down through the hatch. He felt the familiar staticky tingle wash over his body as he passed through the plate which generated the gravity field, and then the buoyancy that flowed over his legs - like climbing down into a pool and feeling the water take your weight, but more so. Once he was fully in the null-gee space of the ship's core, he took a good handhold on the ladder and floated, watching.

Kurogane knew freefall, knew its tricks and hazards. Despite the similarity of sensation it wasn't like swimming, or even like flying; you'd just make a fool of yourself, thrashing at the air to try to propel yourself forward. And despite what your stomach tried to insist you weren't falling, either; there was no outside force acting to move you except your own fool momentum.

Moving in zero-gee was a skill and an art that people had to train in for many years; it was not about brute strength but control, a constant awareness of your own position and the nearest solid surfaces, handholds that could be used for leverage, and not making any hasty movements. Push off with too much force and you could break an arm or a leg when you hit the opposite wall; not enough, and you would be helplessly stranded in dead air without enough momentum to go anywhere. Kurogane, station-born, had grown up in and out of zero-gee and was quite adept at it. Nevertheless he was a clumsy amateur compared to the kinetics, who could control their own momentum and velocity without consideration for pushing off any other surface; _cheating,_ as far as Kurogane was concerned.

But he could tell just from the few minutes he'd been watching that Yuui was incredible, even when compared to other kinetics. He swooped and soared, looping gracefully in the open space surrounding the engine core. A look of intense, inward concentration held his features, and he moved an arm gracefully outward to conserve angular momentum as he slowed and doubled back, looped and spun. Sakura, anchored firmly to the control station and clutching a hot drink in her hands, watched him with wide eyes like a child at a carnival show, and Kurogane didn't blame her. Yuui was something worth watching.

He looked like he was flying.

He looked… beautiful.

Sakura happened to look up and see him, and her gasp alerted Yuui, who braked to a stop mid-air and spun to face him. "Captain Kurogane!" she said, scrambling to put her drink aside and come to attention. "What is it? Have we encountered something?"

Kurogane shook his head. It wasn't as stupid a question as it sounded; on the routine flight between Earth and Mars, there was nothing out there they _should_ encounter… which only meant that if they'd met something - say, an uncharted asteroid or a brace of pirate-hunting feds - it would be bad. "I'd have put on the ships alarm if there was a problem," he said. "No, I just came down here to tell you Syaoran has lunch up."

Yuui perked up, and slapped a pretty smile on his face. "Yay, lunch!" he cheered, waving his arms in a maneuver that would have sent anyone else into an undignified mid-air tumble. "I'm looking forward to it. You have such a well-stocked kitchen, I'm sure -"

Kurogane snorted a laugh and Sakura actually blushed. Yuui looked from one to the other in confusion. "What?" he said.

"You won't be cheering after you've gotten a few of Syaoran's meals under your belt," Kurogane advised him drily.

"Syaoran does his best!" Sakura defended the boy hotly. "He… he always tries really hard."

"I don't understand," Yuui said. "If he can't cook, why is he the one doing it?"

Sakura gave a little shrug. "He won't let me do it all the time," she admitted. "He says it wouldn't be fair, and… to be honest, I'm not much better."

"I don't cook," Kurogane said in a flat, no-argument tone. "But I do eat, so let's get going. It's actually worse if it has time to get cold."

With that threat, the three of them made their way to the exits; Kurogane hauled himself up the ladder, closely followed by their new passenger.

"You know," Kurogane said on impulse as Yuui climbed out of the hatch to the deck beside him, in the moment when he was finding his balance. "You look a lot… different when you're not concentrating on pretending to be happy all the time."

"Different?" Yuui looked up at him, startled and wary. The ghost of a smile tried to flicker over his face, before he banished it with an effort. "Different how?"

"Better," Kurogane told him firmly, and turned to walk away.

* * *

><p>The meal was set out on the shiny countertop when they trooped into the rec room, and Yuui could smell <em>burnt <em>almost immediately. Syaoran was rather sheepishly putting something black and crispy in the centre of the table; when he saw them he flushed. "Sorry," he said. "I set the timer for thirty minutes, I swear, like it said on the packaging..."

"I'm sure we can manage," Sakura said, brightly. Kurogane just shot Yuui a warning look over the top of her head, and Yuui swallowed and smiled at Syaoran as he slid into one of the stiff high-backed chairs bolted by a hinge to the counter surface. Sakura took the seat next to him and nudged him in a friendly fashion.

"Thank you," Yuui said with a small smile, aware of Kurogane's eyes on him. He couldn't let go of the charming smile that easily. It had served him well so far.

"Do they have real cooked food on Earth, Yuui-san?" Sakura asked wistfully as Yuui poked at the burnt thing with his chopsticks, trying to work out what it had been before it became charcoal.

"Yes," he said. "I grew up reading cookbooks. I even used to help out with the cooking at the academy."

When he glanced up all three of the crewmembers were staring at him, with matching thoughtful expressions. Kurogane's red eyes were narrowed, while Syaoran's were wide and eager. Sakura had paused with her chopsticks halfway to her mouth.

"So you cooked for yourself?" Kurogane asked, at the same time as Syaoran said, "_Real _books?"

"... Yes?" Yuui said puzzled, looking between them, and Kurogane leaned back in his chair, his chopsticks grasped still in his hand, and smiled slowly. It was the first time he'd seen anything but a scowl on the big man's face, and it was rather unnerving. He reached for the glass of water next to his plate to hide his reaction to that wicked smile. "I used to read the cooking books because... well. It doesn't matter. I didn't have a chance to book much at home, and most of what I did at the Academy involved assisting the real cooks; I haven't had much practice."

"Your family must have been incredibly rich, Yuui-san," Syaoran said enviously, right as he was drinking, and he nearly spat the contents of the glass right out; as it was he choked and had to take another gulp to soothe his throat.

"What makes you say that?" Yuui asked, thinking back over what he'd said, trying to grasp where he'd given them the impression he came from wealth. It stung rather, reminding him of too many nights huddling with his brother for warmth, too many days filled with too-hard work and little food.

Sakura looked embarrassed. "Well, you went to a special school," she said. "And you paid so very much money to the captain to get onboard..."

"Oh," Yuui said, his voice going flat. He looked from one face to another and could see it in each of their eyes, even in Sakura's; contempt and disdain for the pampered, useless Earth boy, the resentment and envy of the poor for the rich. He'd felt it himself, many times, he and Fai clustered at a window watching people walk past whose fancy, jeweled electronic toys could have paid for food and heat all winter.

He didn't want these people to feel the same way about him as he had towards those people. So he looked down at the plastic tabletop as he said plainly, "My family was never rich. All we had growing up was whatever money Fai and I could get for - odd jobs." He couldn't bring himself to admit to this crew of spacers that they'd been decom rats, the lowest of the low in any space dock facility.

"Really? But -" Syaoran stuttered, and Yuui could almost hear him reshuffling his assumptions. "The Captain said you gave five hundred thousand, and your credit checked out -" Kurogane shot the boy a fierce scowl, and he blushed and shut up; no doubt he wasn't supposed to admit that he was in on the Captain's finances.

"It did check out," Yuui said quickly, with just a hint of defiance. The last thing he wanted was for them to decide he was trying to cheat them.

"It's - oh, hell." He sighed, and put his hands over his eyes; he hadn't wanted to admit this, but what were they going to do, tell the police? "I stole it. I snatched an armored car off the road and broke it open. Someone downside helped launder it for me so it wouldn't be traceable. It should be fine."

This announcement was greeted by silence. He looked up, no longer able to bear the silence, to meet three astonished gazes. "What?" he demanded.

"You hijacked an armored car?" Syaoran said in an awed voice. "All by yourself? The anti-theft measures on those things are unbreakable!"

"Not really," Yuui said. He still remembered the screeching sound of the wheels on the pavements, smelled the burning brakes as the driver tried frantically to stop the car; to no avail, as Yuui's telekinetic talent dragged the vehicle from its path and off the side of the road, sparks flying as it burst through the metal barrier and over the edge of the cliff.

No anti-theft measures were proof, it seemed, against falling a hundred feet through the air onto solid concrete. Yuui had been glad, as he tore apart the wreckage in search of his goal, that he could not see the bodies of the drivers and guards who had been in the armored car; only a slowly spreading pool of blood over the ground. But after he'd killed so many in the raid on the base, what was one or two more deaths on his conscience? They'd needed the money. _Fai_ needed it. And so he'd done whatever was necessary.

"That's amazing!" Sakura said, eyes sparkling. Yuui looked at her with some surprise; he hadn't expected sweet Sakura to be so, well… _approving._ But then again, she _was_ a pirate.

"There sure is more to you than meets the eye," Kurogane said, making a short gesture with his chopsticks as he chewed thoughtfully on the caramelized food. "You look like a harmless, useless Earthboy dandy -"

"Hey," Yuui objected.

"- but within the course of a couple days you've raided a base, hijacked an armored car, robbed a hospital _and_ fooled all of Earth-space port security," Kurogane went on. Those red eyes turned on him, sizing him up.

"_And_ he can cook," Sakura added, beaming. "You can cook for us!"

"Yes, I'm not very good at it," Syaoran said excitedly, turned over the blackened lump of lunch with one of his chopsticks, and both kids turned their eyes on Kurogane, who actually looked slightly unnerved at the dual gaze effect. For a second Yuui was reminded of two children turning big sad puppy-dog eyes on their father, and dismissed it hastily, a little surprised at himself.

"I guess," Kurogane said slowly. "If he's going to be part of the crew, he can do some useful chores."

"Great!" Sakura enthused, her green eyes bright and warm, and turned back to Yuui. "You will, won't you, Yuui-san?"

"Ah… I'd love to!" Yuui said; still shaken by that _part of the crew_ comment. He'd been too busy for the past few days to think further than the next few hours. The idea of having a _place_ here - to be part of something again - was almost more than he could grasp.

"Yeah," said Syaoran, and smiled. "Honestly, Yuui-san, you have to be better than me. All the culinary skill in my generation went to my brother."

"You have a brother?" Yuui asked, in genuine surprise. It hadn't occurred to him that the crew would have families beyond the ship. Syaoran nodded, but didn't reply as he finished off the black lump of... whatever it was he had cooked; Yuui wasn't a starving child anymore and was not particularly keen to try it.

"He has a twin," said Sakura, covering for him; Syaoran gave her a grateful smile. "Not an identical one, like you and... Fai-san."

"Oh," said Yuui. That explained why _twins_ hadn't been Syaoran's first thought on seeing Fai in the cryo-capsule; to him, _twin _meant non-identical. For a moment he felt a kind of kinship, borne out of being halves of a whole, and then pushed it away. Syaoran was capable of leaving his twin and travelling all over the solar system for a girl he liked. Yuui was Fai's, nobody else's.

"Kimihiro lives back on Mars with the rest of the family," Syaoran said. "We won't see him this trip. I'm from... well, I'm from the boondocks, not like Sakura-chan," and he flushed here, "but we email from time to time. I'm not half the chef he is."

There was a particularly loud _crunch _from Kurogane's end of the countertop as he broke his food in half, and he raised an eyebrow when the three of them looked at him in surprise. "You don't say," he said dryly. "I'd put it more like one tenth."

"Captain," Sakura said, frowning, but Syaoran was grinning, obviously unoffended, so she _hmphed _and turned back to her own meal. Following her example, Yuui curiously picked up his, aware of Kurogane's eyes on him.

It tasted awful, but he found he didn't mind. His thoughts were already racing ahead to tonight's dinner, and what he would cook to repay this odd band of miscreants, to show his gratitude for how they treated him. He felt something he never had before, not at any of his miserable childhood jobs or in the hallowed walls of Earth's prestigious psionic academy.

He felt welcome.

* * *

><p>Once lunch was done with, Syaoran showed him around the kitchen while Sakura and Kurogane slipped out to do whatever it was they did around the ship. For now his attention was focused on the shiny steel of perfectly stored kitchen knives, and the baskets and bags of ingredients just waiting to be prepared. They had a cryo-freezer for storing meat and vegetables as fresh, to his delight, and it was <em>full<em>.

After Syaoran had shown him the kitchen's contents and taught him how to use its various bits of machinery, he vanished too, leaving Yuui with nothing but the stainless steel. It was many hours yet before dinner, but he took one of the electronic books off its shelf and flicked through it until he found a good guide to spacer cuisine. He spent a good hour sitting on the sofa with the little book, paging rapidly through list after list of recipes, many of them making his mouth water with the title alone.

The apartment he and Fai had grown up in had had very little in the way of cooking facilities: a microwave, an electric kettle, and an ancient behemoth of a refrigerator that was always empty. He had tried his best, once they started working, and what things he had been able to make had turned out edible, but he had never been happy with them. It wasn't until they'd left for the school - or more accurately, been thrown out - that he had been able to experience a larger kitchen. He had gladly taken Fai's share of kitchen duties, and the cooks had responded to his interest and taught him more and more recipes, and even let him practice on his own with the school equipment during his break hours. Fai had watched him with a bored expression; cooking was never Fai's thing.

Fai liked math and science. He always had. He never had to think when it came to numbers; Yuui was quick but Fai had been _fast_. He'd loved space and engineering, and when Yuui closed his eyes that was what he saw; Fai, writing out equations longhand with the pen Ashura had bought him for their nineteenth birthday, the desk lights turned down low and his eyes bright and alert.

Yuui wondered if he could wake Fai up before they arrived in Europa. If Fai would be in any condition to notice the ship. He used to talk about space travel, back when the military school staff thought they were nothing more than two bright normal young men, possibly with a good career ahead of them. Fai had been tempted by a poster recruiting for... the solar marines, Yuui thought, but he couldn't remember. It had been years ago.

As he flipped through the recipes footsteps sounded in the hallway and the door hissed open again; Sakura took a few steps into the room and paused, seeing him. She had changed out of her mechanic's coveralls into some plain but obviously comfortable exercise clothing; she blinked in surprise when she saw him on the sofa.

"Yuui-san," she said, tilting her head to one side. "What are you doing still...?"

"Looking up recipes," he said, hefting the book, and she smiled. "I know I don't have to worry about it yet, but I wanted to have a bit of an idea."

"Well," she said thoughtfully, "Chicken wouldn't go amiss. We haven't had it in a while, you see."

"I see," he replied, tapping 'chicken' into the search bar of the reader. It flashed him a small hourglass symbol briefly, and then displayed '1-50 of 30,000' results; he settled himself against the arm of the sofa and began scrolling through them, looking for something tasty, within his ingredient range, that would please the crew. It was at least a very comfortable sofa, long enough for him to stretch out in full and quite wide. He suspected it was Kurogane-sized.

Sakura came into the room fully, letting the door close behind her, and raised her voice. "Mokona, may I access the exercise equipment, please?"

"Confirmed," Mokona replied, her disembodied voice seeming to come from everywhere at once. Yuui hunched quietly into the sofa; there was something unnerving about that voice, flat but also sweet and willing to please. It reminded him of someone he had known.

"Thank you," Sakura said as the machines detached from the wall. She took off the towel she'd been wearing around her shoulders, folding it neatly and placing it on the arm of the sofa by Yuui's feet. "We all have to do a few hours a day on these things," she said, attracting his attention, "But I have to do more than the others, because I spend more time in zero-g." She pulled a face.

"Even the captain?" Yuui asked blankly, trying to imagine Kurogane using the treadmill and failing. He couldn't even picture Kurogane in sweatpants. Did they even make sweatpants for his size? He was so very tall...

"Even the captain," Sakura confirmed, as she climbed onto the exercise bike. "Too much time in low gravity is bad for all of us."

Yuui thinned his lips, studying the rack of equipment dubiously. He was no stranger to it, and he knew all about the effects of gravity on the human body, but he wasn't sure whether or not he could coax Fai onto it, and if he could, how easy it would be to keep him going. Whatever Earth had done to him had left him... strange.

"Sakura-chan," he said, and she looked over at him quizzically although she didn't stop moving, "What's it like to be a precog?"

"What's it like to be a kinetic?" she replied, with a small smile. "I've never been anything else, Yuui-san. I just _am_."

"It's just - " he paused, struggling to find the words; opened his mouth, thought better of it, subsided. Tried again. "I met one other precog before you, just one, and... she was different."

"How so?" Sakura asked. There was a note of caution in her voice. "Who was she?"

"She was - her name was," he paused, groping through his dusty recollections, finds it. "Kohane."

This is Kohane-chan, _General Ko had said, her old wrinkled face still and unyielding as she looked out over the classroom full of young psionics. The girl at her side stood there, docile and unmoving before their curious eyes. _She posses the rarest of the lesser three talents - Fai! Tell me what the talents are, if you can't pay attention.

_His brother stopped squirming and raised his eyebrows, pulling the touchscreen stylus out of his mouth. He'd already chewed the end of it pretty badly, Yuui noticed, and winced, but Fai seemed supremely calm and unnerved as he put the bitemark-covered stylus down and said, _she's a precognitive, obviously. The other lesser talents are clairvoyance and empathy. The greater two are 'paths and 'kinetics.

Hmm_, the General said, her mouth looking more pinched than it usually did. Fai didn't look away or blink, just stuck the plastic pen back in his mouth, and eventually she broke eye contact, putting her hand on Kohane's shoulder. The girl just stood there like a doll, and Yuui found he couldn't look at her for too long; she felt_ wrong_, like a marionette with its strings in the General's hands._

"I don't recognize that name," Sakura told him, frowning. "Where did you meet her?"

"At the Academy. She worked for the Earth government," Yuui said, and then hesitated. Sakura was running faster as the treadmill sped up. "I... there was a rumor that she was sold to the authorities by her mother," he said, carefully, and saw Sakura's shoulders stiffen. "There's... a reward, for helping Earth find psionics."

He should know. His father had tried to claim it on him after he'd accidentally outed his powers to the staff of the ordinary Peacekeeper school, before they'd shoved him and Fai in another suborbital to be shipped back south to Hong Kong. Fai had punched the man _again_, this time in the face.

"I take it she didn't see it coming either," Sakura said with a sad smile, but he shook his head.

"No. She did. She just didn't do anything to stop it."

Why? _Fai asked, straddling the bench next to her in cafeteria; Kohane lifted her head in response to his question, her eyes soft and cool. Yuui was skulking behind his back, torn between his own curiosity and horror at Fai's forwardness._

Because_, Kohane said, and blinked slowly; up close she was even more disconcerting, less a girl and more a robot. Yuui wondered if she was always this way, or if it was something that happened to all precogs._ Because I wanted my mama to be happy , _she said, and smiled her sad sweet smile, turning back to her food and writing them out of her existence just like that. Fai shifted back, uncomfortable._

Stop me if I get that far, _he said in a low voice meant only for Yuui's ears, and Yuui swallowed and nodded and didn't say, _how?

Sakura said nothing for several seconds, just jogging on the treadmill, and Yuui watched her cautiously over the ebook. She had her back to him, her face unreadable, but he thought he saw tension in her shoulders; doubt, perhaps, for the people in her life, wondering who had sold her out.

"No," she said, suddenly. She switched the machine down and slowed down accordingly. "Nobody I know would have given me away. Mars isn't Earth, we all stick together, even in the cities!" She flashed him a look, daring him to deny this. "My mother was already gone, but... no. There's no way Father or Touya or Yuki would have. My brother and his boyfriend," she added to Yuui's quizzical look. "You met Touya. He was the bartender on the space station who sent you to the Captain."

"He was?" Yuui said, although looking back he could remember a few details of the bartender's face. He didn't look that much like his sister. "No wonder he sent me here then, if he's your brother," he said. "He must send a lot of people your way."

Sakura halted, putting her hands on her hips, and stood there, quietly. Eventually she said, "He doesn't know I'm here."

Yuui frowned, not understanding.

"He doesn't know what happened to me after I was kidnapped," Sakura explained, reluctantly. "It's better that he doesn't know. Last time we went back to Mars, Yuki told Syaoran that Earth was still looking for me. They have surveillance on my father. They don't know Syaoran-kun helped rescue me or his family would be in danger too. "

"Oh," Yuui said quietly, and she turned and gave him a wan smile.

"How about your family, Yuui-san?" she said. "Are they safe?"

Yuui snorted despite himself. "Our mother died when we were twelve," he said. "Our father... we're not really... he threw us out when we were seventeen."

"He _threw you out_?" Sakura said, her eyes going wide. "But... but he's your father!"

Yuui thinned his lips. "He was an alcoholic," he said. "We raided his liquor collection and... well. Did something he didn't like."

He couldn't meet her eyes. It wasn't a lie; they had broken into his liquor stash. Fai had said their father was out, and Yuui had believed him, and he'd had a bottle of vodka in his hand when their father came out of his bedroom to see them, Fai leaning back against the couch with his pants around his ankles and Yuui at work with his tongue between his brother's spread thighs.

What the fuck, _he'd said, standing framed in the doorway, and Yuui had leapt back from his twin instinctively, so fast he knocked the vodka bottle flying. Their father was filling the doorframe, a big man, broad across the shoulders; Yuui had always thought they had inherited his height but their mother's build_.

Do you mind, _Fai said lazily, showing his teeth. He stood up, pulling his pants up while Yuui frantically wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand as though getting rid of the evidence would change anything_. I was busy, _his twin continued, drawing their father's attention as he no doubt wanted; the man swung for him and missed, and drew back to hit him again, but Fai was no longer a starving child and he didn't stay still. He simply stepped forward and slugged their father first, a good solid blow to the gut that made him double over, and then chaos_ really _descended_.

They'd been shipped up north to the military school the next morning, Fai with a huge black eye and a tense smile that almost completely hid whatever was going on in his head, nursing bleeding and bruised knuckles. Fai always said his only regret was not hospitalizing the bastard; Yuui had said nothing, and didn't like to dwell on it even now.

"Our father won't miss us," he said, firmly, and gave Sakura a small smile before returning his attention to the book in his palms. A few more screens and he saw a recipe for Chinese-style lemon chicken he thought he could pull off.

He got to his feet, meaning to go look through the kitchen and see what else he could make to go with it, when the door hissed open again; Sakura paused her cooldown stretches and let out a breath when Kurogane stepped inside, ducking his head to get under the doorway. His strange eyes flicked from Sakura to Yuui to the exercise bikes, and he huffed out a breath.

"Captain," Sakura said cheerfully. "We were just -"

"Talking, yeah," he interrupted. "I guessed. You done with the machines?"

"No, I -" she paused. "That wasn't really a question, was it."

"Nope," Kurogane said. "Captain's privilege."

"You can help me with dinner, Sakura-chan," Yuui said, and she made a small face at her captain and hopped off the treadmill, going for her towel. Kurogane grunted and stepped further into the room. He wasn't wearing sweatpants like Sakura did; instead he wore a strange garment, loose and flowing, like the samurai in the fantasy flicks playing back home.

The robes showed more of his chest and throat than the spacer's garb had, and without the line of the shoulder protectors it was obviously just how broad he was across the chest; he was huge but somehow didn't look out of place, despite being tall enough that he had to duck to fit through a doorway that could accommodate Yuui's own not inconsiderable eighteen decimeters. Yuui was reminded of the old footage they'd shown him at the school, of the children born to the early spacers who had grown up in low-gravity environments. Some of them had grown as large as twenty-four decimeters before they died, their hearts unable to keep up with the size of their bones, and after that growth regulating hormones became mandatory for all extraterrestrial populations.

Kurogane wasn't quite that tall - he looked just over twenty decimeters - but still, he had height enough. He _towered_ over the kids. Yuui wondered idly if his parents had skimped his dosage of the drug, but doubted it; he didn't carry himself like someone who had grown up hungry.

"You got something to say?" Kurogane growled, and Yuui snapped out of his maunderings as he realized he'd been staring. Kurogane had paused with the weight bar halfway up his chest - holding it effortlessly still despite the high settings on the machine - and was half-glaring at him.

"Mm? Oh, just disappointed that Captain Bodybuilder isn't wearing a sexy spandex gym outfit," Yuui said, giving the man a cheeky grin. It was easy to fall back into teasing; it was a distraction from bad, old thoughts. "It means I can't call you Captain Tightpants any more!"

Kurogane snorted and resumed his reps. "This is what I always wear. It's more comfortable. You're going to need to get your skinny ass on these machines too, you know, if you don't want your bones to rot in the low gravity."

"Why, Captain, I didn't know you cared," Yuui said in a sing-song voice. "But if you would stop interrupting me, I could get dinner started to feed up _all_ our skinny asses."

Sakura was giggling, watching them; Kurogane just snorted and turned his back, shifting the bar into place for pull-downs. Yuui couldn't help it - his gaze lingered for a moment longer on the rippling muscles of that broad back before he managed to shake himself and turn away.

It was good to have so much variety of food to choose from, he thought as he mixed the sauce. And comforting to have it so close by. He and Fai had been overwhelmed by the military school and its food, and had gotten in massive amounts of trouble in their first few months for stealing food and hiding it in their dorm room, building a stockpile in case it stopped miraculously appearing before them every day. The psionic academy had laid on even _better_ food, as was suitable for its students. Fai had been pretty approving of that much, even if he hadn't trusted the academy staff and had made Yuui lie the whole time he was there - even to Professor Ashura who had been nothing but kind to them - about the extent of his talent. The habit had set in, and even now, Yuui lied.

Speaking of his twin, Yuui thought - his hands working on automatic as he pulled ingredients from drawers, Sakura helpfully fetching certain items from the list on the electronic book - he really ought to run that toxicity screen after dinner. The Mokona could probably help him do it, he'd have to ask. Fortunately the triage capsule was made with such medical procedures in mind; he should be able to do it without bringing Fai out of sedation.

If he wanted to have Fai awake and alert he needed to find out what was wrong with his brother, what drugs they had given him. By tracing the drugs he might be able to find out what his brother's gift had been, that they had been so desperate for it and so uncaring about his physical state. Perhaps they had been trying to create another Kohane; a hollowed-out doll, sweet and unthinking and docile. If so... well.

They wouldn't get their wish, Yuui thought. Whatever it took, he would spare Fai her fate. His brother would never be a puppet for them.

* * *

><p>There was no night or day on a spaceship, not in the way Yuui thought of the term; in space there was no once-a-day rotation to cast them into planet shadow, no timekeeping at all except for the mechanical running of Mokona's mechanical clock. But the human body still needed night and day, periods of darkness and light; and so the ship had a scheduled night period, where the lights were dimmed and all sensible people took themselves to bed.<p>

Syaoran and Sakura were both asleep but Yuui, pressing his ear carefully against the door, thought he heard movement in Kurogane's quarters. He hesitated, torn between a daunted desire not to draw the Captain's ire by disturbing him in the middle of the night, and the determination that _now_ was the best time to make his pitch.

He shut his eyes and red lines played across the inside of his eyelids, the final readout of the triage unit's toxicity scan that had seared itself into his brain. It wasn't fair, it just _wasn't_. Fai had always been so careful, so strict about what either of them put into their bodies. After their mother's death he'd taken a hard-line stance against drugs of _any_ kind, anything from overdoing caffeine or alcohol to the more sneakily seductive drugs available on the street. And now all that had been taken away from him against his will.

With the image of his mother's frozen face fixed in his mind, Yuui took a breath and raised his fist to knock. Before his hand touched the surface of the metal, though, the door slid suddenly open and he was confronted with an expression like a thundercloud.

"It's the middle of the damn night, can't you see the corridor lights?" Kurogane growled at him. "What do you want?"

Off-balance, Yuui responded by flashing him a brilliant smile. "Just to talk about a few things, Captain Sleepyhead," he said. "Can I come in?"

Ungraciously Kurogane opened the door the rest of the way and stood aside. "Make it quick," he said. He was wearing another loose synthetic robe, not unlike the one he had worn in the exercise room; most likely he was getting ready to sleep. That could be good, in that it would make him suggestible; but it could be bad, since he would also be irritable.

But then again, he was _always_ irritable.

Yuui stepped quickly inside, his bright blue eyes doing a quick scan of the room before returning to Kurogane's face. Captain's privilege, indeed; this room was three times the size of his, rivaled only by the engine room or the galley. It was surprisingly free of clutter, though; only a few subtle touches of ornamentation on the walls or floor, probably everything was locked away in the cabinets that lined the long room. The only things out in the open were a futon, laid out for the night, and a Shinto-style shrine along the wall. He caught a glimpse of a pair of portraits, some gently curling incense and bells, before Kurogane stepped into his line-of-sight and glared at him.

"Well, what do you want?" Kurogane said again.

Yuui took a few nervous steps around the entry area of Kurogane's quarters, hands flitting out as though to touch things before falling away. "I… just wanted to talk," he said. "To find out more. About this ship, and where we're going." He turned and gave Kurogane a winsome smile. "You know, if I'm going to be part of the crew and all."

"We're going to Mars," Kurogane said. "No changing that. We have a delivery there."

"And…" Yuui hesitated. "What about after that?"

Kurogane frowned, his red eyes narrowing. "Europa. That's where you wanted to go, and I took your money, so that's where we're going. Unless you changed your mind."

Yuui gave a little shrug. It didn't much matter to him where they went; Europa had just sounded nice and far away from… everything. He groped for words. "I wondered if… we could get something on Mars."

"You can get pretty much anything on Mars," Kurogane said. "It's a whole damn planet, after all. Be more specific."

"Um… some medicine," Yuui said quickly. He swallowed, feeling his pulse speed up in his throat. "For Fai - my brother. I can't keep him asleep forever, and he's going to need help when he wakes up." There. That was a perfectly reasonable request, how could Kurogane refuse that?

But the captain's suspicious frown only deepened. "What medicine did you have in mind?"

Yuui took a quick breath. "Ketazolam. Tropium. Sominem if we can't get either of those. Thebaine, though we shouldn't need much of that."

He anxiously watched Kurogane's expression darkened; it would have been too much to hope for that a smuggler wouldn't know those names, wouldn't know the common street names behind those fancy scientific-sounding words. _Crash. Time-outters. Sleeper. Queen's Lace._ "I don't deal in drugs," the man snarled. "What the hell are you thinking, that I would -"

"I ran a toxicity scan," Yuui said, "and the results are… He's just a mess. They must have been pumping him full of tranqs and sedatives nonstop to keep him docile - he's got a dependency on three different major drugs and tolerance for half a dozen more." He shut his eyes, still seeing the red text parading across his field of vision, casting a new ghastly pallor over Fai's sleeping face. "I'll pay for everything, I just need you to find a supplier for me. It's not like it's going to be long term - all I want to do is get him off the addictions."

"Then do that," Kurogane said coldly. "Cold turkey. I won't have anything to do with it. You hired me to transport you and your cargo - not to be your drug mule."

"That might kill him!" Yuui clenched his teeth, resisting the urge to scream in frustration. He took a deep breath and struggled to find his way forward. He didn't want to start another fight with Kurogane. The other man was bigger, stronger, but what did that matter to a telekinetic? He could always throw Kurogane against the ceiling if necessary - but then what? He wasn't afraid of losing, but he didn't know how to win; the only way of ending fights he knew was to kill his opponent. And he couldn't kill Kurogane; he needed him.

How could he persuade Kurogane? Maybe - maybe he should try seduction again. The thought wasn't as repellant as it had been before; he'd seen the way Kurogane looked at him in the engine bay, and truth to tell had done some looking of his own during Kurogane's workout.

Yuui shifted his posture slightly, going from tense and anxious to inviting, and stepped into Kurogane's personal space. "You don't really want that," he murmured. "A strung-out crash addict, with God only knows what kind of psychic powers, on a sealed-up spaceship like this? It wouldn't be good for anyone."

"I don't deal drugs," Kurogane said stubbornly, standing his ground, although he leaned back slightly. The look he shot Yuui was eloquent; _what the hell do you think you're doing?_

"Oh please," Yuui said in a coaxing tone. "Why do you have to be so stubborn, Captain? Why can't you just… bend a little for once? I'd be _really_ grateful…"

Kurogane shifted, and Yuui knew he was about to push him away; he moved faster, using just a light kinetic touch to keep Kurogane within range of his grasp. His arms came up and wrapped over Kurogane's shoulders, and he went up on his toes - _damn, he's tall! _- to kiss him.

This, at least, he had plenty of practice in; he _knew_ he was a good kisser, and at first Kurogane seemed receptive enough. But just as Yuui tried to move deeper, press his body up along the other man's, it ended. Kurogane wrenched himself backwards, putting his arms on Yuui's shoulders to hold him at arm's length. "Don't _do_ that," he said through his teeth, exasperated.

Yuui backed off a step, shooting Kurogane a look full of bewildered hurt. "Why not?" he said. "You didn't mind…"

"Stop trying to seduce me for favors," Kurogane snapped. "It won't get you anywhere and I'm pretty damn insulted that you think I'm that kind of man. For that matter, I'm getting sick of _you_ pretending like you're disposable. You're worth more than that, so start acting like it."

"What?" Confusion overtook resentment, and Yuui took another step backwards. "What are you talking about?"

Kurogane crossed his arms, leaning against the wall. "Y'know, you really suck at this," he remarked.

"Kissing?" Yuui's eyebrows went up. "I am not -"

"I'm not talking about that," Kurogane said, waving a hand in exasperation. "I mean you're terrible at… being a criminal. Getting what you want. You've spent the last couple of days blundering around the Earth sphere like an elephant, not knowing where to go or who to talk to, just smashing things when they get in your way. It's sheer damn luck that you weren't caught a dozen times by now."

"I know," Yuui said, his voice strained. He'd been fighting against his own ignorance, it felt like, every step of the way: that he should have _known_ better, that he should have _done_ better, but he just didn't know how. "I didn't - I didn't know what to do. But I had to do _something. _I couldn't let them -"

"Hundreds of people at the airbase," Kurogane reminded him remorselessly, and saw Yuui flinch as though Kurogane had struck him with a flail. "Not to mention whoever was in that armored car, I bet. Anyone else that you failed to mention? That's still a pretty respectable body count for an amateur. And most of them didn't really deserve to die, did they? They were just collateral damage."

"I didn't want to," Yuui whispered, his heart pounding. Could he have spared them? How? He had had such a limited timeframe, and it had been so easy...

_Too easy_ , he realized, with a burst of shock. Kurogane was right, but... he groped desperately for a defense. "I didn't have a lot of -"

"Don't get me wrong," Kurogane cut him off. "I'm a killer myself. I'm not preaching morality here. But if you're going to kill people, then you ought to _want_ to kill them. There ought to be a reason, otherwise it's just waste. But you didn't mean to kill them, and you didn't want to, and - here's the thing - _you didn't have to._

"There are a hundred ways of getting money, if you need to, that don't involve crushing armored cars," he went on. "And if you'd planned the raid on the airbase a little more carefully - hired some help - you might have been able to get in and out without killing anybody at all."

Yuui couldn't think of what to say; his stomach was a tight knot of guilt and grief. Yes. He had crashed that fuel drone because it had been quick and easy; he could have planned and waited. He had raided the facility on his own because killing people was _easier_ than anything else, and how low had he fallen that that was the case? What would Fai say if he were here?

"You're not just an ordinary kinetic, are you?" Kurogane said in a deceptively soft voice. "The kids might not have noticed, but I did; I've never known a kinetic who could pull apart an armored car, or pull a drone down out of the sky. You're powerful, but you're dumb, and that's a bad combination - you keep wandering around the galaxy like this and you'll be a danger to everyone. Including yourself. And your brother."

Kurogane paused, and Yuui could not think of a thing to say. His mind had whited out as if in shock, because Kurogane knew too much, and Yuui _knew_ that everything he had said was true. For a moment Yuui's instinct, borne of his time spent lying to academy staff, was to deny it, to pretend that he was an ordinary kinetic. Fai had always insisted on that, and he had been wise to do so; but somehow the familiar lie wouldn't come, and after a few seconds he let it go. There was no point, anyway. This man saw him as _him_ , not as Yuui-shadow-of-Fai. How many more lies of his would the spacer captain have to pick apart before he remembered?

Kurogane sighed, and his stern features looked suddenly tired. "You know, despite all that, I don't think you're completely hopeless," he said, in a voice that was a little softer. "I don't waste my time on hopeless things. You're ignorant, but you've got a brain; you could learn how to do things, if you tried. And you're brave, and you're loyal. That counts for a lot in this world; you can buy brains, but you can't buy heart."

Yuui linked his hands in front of him, staring at them. They weren't shaking, he supposed he ought to be grateful for that small mercy. He felt so lost, suddenly, all the confidence he had gained stripped from him; there was blood on his hands and no Fai around to give him orders and - he sneaked a peek at Kurogane behind his hair. He wasn't Fai, but Yuui didn't know who else to turn to. In a small voice, a voice that was little more than a shadow of itself, he said, "What should I do?"

"Well right now," Kurogane said, "It's after midnight ship-time, so you should go the hell to bed. We've still got seven days until we reach Mars space; we can decide what to do about your brother later."

Yuui gave a small nod, his face hollowed and desolate. He didn't want to sleep; he was afraid of seeing the bodies again, crowding around him, accusing him, insisting that they didn't _have _to die. After a moment he looked up, and tried to smile; Kurogane just rolled his eyes. "Well, all right then, Captain Sage Advice," he said. "I'll see you in the morning."

Kurogane keyed open the door and moved aside, and Yuui walked past him into the corridor. Before closing the door, Kurogane hesitated. "Hey," he said. "Just so you know."

Yuui stopped two steps in the corridor, his back to Kurogane. "What?" he said.

"As a matter of fact, you _don't_ completely suck at kissing," Kurogane said, in a tone that tried too hard to be casual. "If you get to a point where you want to do that again - for your own reasons, not because you want favors from me - then you can come back."

Astonished, Yuui whirled around to face him, but the door was already sliding shut.

Well. That would at least give him something else to think about, as he didn't sleep tonight.

* * *

><p><strong>-end part 1 - Earth -<strong>

to be continued.


	9. Part II: MARS

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Fai/Yuui, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Sakura/Syaoran  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapters will be posted both on my profile and also on her fic journal, which can be found at inmyvortex on Livejournal._

* * *

><p><strong>Part II: MARS<strong>

_Space unrolled a deep black velvet canvas for the next chapter of human history; painted, as ever, with the conflicts and politics of human experience. Those who had hoped that extrasolar space would provide humans with a uniting frontier quickly realized that where there were profits to be made and territory to be claimed, the brotherhood of common man held not much sway._

_Japan was the first to establish a permanent space habitat; of all the wealthy, industrialized nations they had the greatest command of robotics and automation. It was they who built the first space docks, the floating castles of metal and plastic balanced at the fulcrums of gravity between the Earth and the Moon. Although the United States retained their tenuous legal ownership on the Lunar outposts, they owned no ships or shuttles to transport people or goods, so the claim was hollow; the moon might fly an American flag, but it spoke with a Russian accent._

_For years the Japanese _zaibatsu_ - megacorporations run by interlocking family groups - ruled the skies above Earth. They dispatched satellites to Earth orbit, automated mining robots to the asteroid belt, terraforming robots to Mars, survey robots to the outer solar system. _Their wealth and power grew along with a strange new spacer culture - born half of old cultural traditions and half of their new, deadly environment - and the games between each clan grew ever more bloodthirsty as the stakes grew higher.__

_But as the infrastructure in close-Earth space grew, more and more players fought to take their space on the board. The _zaibatsu_ had wealth, but not manpower, and despite great strides in artificial intelligence their automation could only do so much. In time, the _zaibatsu_ could no longer provide enough warm bodies to fill the demand for habitation and work; eagerly other countries stepped up to fill the gap. __The terraforming of Mars had barely begun, but sturdy domes were easy enough to build, and soon provided an outlet for the crowded cities Earth. _

_And so began a new kind of space race: for Mars soon declared itself a democratic protectorate, and the nation that had the most citizens would de facto own the Red Planet. The country that could build the most ships and send the most bodies to Mars would be the victor, and rich, populous China very quickly came to dominate the race and the planet. __Other nations - India, America, Europe - fought to claim corners of the red planet for their own, but the momentum was against them. _

_For a time, China boasted that with Mars as its foothold, China would soon command all the heavens; for a time, it seemed like nothing could stop that destiny from being carried out. __Yet the larger the empire, the sooner its dissolution; political scientists argued whether it was the War of Martian Independence that triggered the Chinese Civil War, or the other way around. Rumors whispered of shady dealings, corruption and sabotage orchestrated by the shadowed organization of the Triads - but then, rumors always prefer to blame criminal masterminds for the stupidity and inefficiency of everyday men._

_Even as solar habitation flourished - colonies leapfrogging from Mars to the asteroid belt to the distant gas-giant moons - the old terrestrial powers descended into chaos. By the end of the century the central Chinese authority collapsed, and more than a dozen new states emerged from the chaos claiming independent legitimacy. Led by Taiwan, the new countries clamored for entry into the United Nations - and, with the loss of China and withdrawal of America from the voting board years earlier, quickly voted themselves into positions of leadership - although European Union remained a stubborn minority block, as it does to this day._

_The new power that rose from the ashes called itself the Eurasian Federation - not the only government on Earth, certainly, but by far the most formidable giant of military and economic might that the world had ever seen, easily eclipsing the fading memory of American and Russian superpower. Now, at last, after years of indifference and laissez-faire, the new Earth government sought to reclaim the unruly children scattered throughout space._

_Although Martian and Lunar independence was an established fact, still the Federation fought to extend the eminent domain of its authority over all of solar space. Senior Minister Fei Wong Reed, head of the Eurasian Federation's Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, has even gone on record as saying that _**all**_ human habitations - even the far-flung settlements of the deep-space colony pods - should be brought under the common mantle of Earth governance. _

_How he intends that Earth should enforce that, when travel to even the closest interstellar colony is a matter of decades and the only possible communications is through the network of telepaths - remains a mystery._

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	10. 8: a renegade survivor

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: 'Areography' is the technical term for Martian geography (for Ares, the Greek name for Mars.) It was mentioned a few times in the previous chapter that Mars was mostly settled by Chinese and other East Asians; but by the time they got there the planetary sectors and many large geographical features had already been named. They probably have Chinese names as well, but I don't know 'em.

* * *

><p>Yuui pulled himself up the ladder to the control room. After ten days on board the Mokona he had gotten used to the funny little flip of his stomach when the gravity turned over, and stabilized himself with an automatic combination of telekinesis and his own natural grace. It was surprising to realize how natural and unconscious the use of his talent was becoming.<p>

_But then again_, he thought, _this is what they trained me for._

"Good morning, Yuui-san," Syaoran said, lifting his head from his control panel. "Your timing is very good, we're just making a holding orbit now."

"Just now?" Yuui turned to peer at the display screens, as though they were windows he could see out of; they were currently showing a number of tracking projections and scrolling walls of text. "I thought we were supposed to arrive last night."

"In Mars planetary space, yeah," Kurogane grunted, not turning around in his Captain's chair. "We took a correction around Deimos, and then it took ten hours to get out of the Kajitori controlled space."

There was a distinctly unpleasant note in his voice on those last words, like he was spitting out something bitter, and the slice of his face that Yuui could see was drawn in an angry scowl. He quickly looked away, as though afraid that he could somehow have been responsible for the captain's foul mood.

He hadn't taken Kurogane up on his strange… proposal. A part of him felt guilty that he hadn't - it was as much as saying that he'd only tried to get in Kurogane's pants in the first place for his own benefit - and another part of him felt guilty for even being tempted. Kurogane was a striking man, and the brief kiss had been electric; Yuui had still felt the other man's taste on his tongue and his hands on his skin for hours afterwards. He was too confused to know what he wanted, but he could no longer deny that he wanted _something._

But no matter how tempting the offer, he just couldn't do that to Fai. He couldn't forget the joy, the bliss of being in his twin's arms, just the two of them making everything else in the universe go away. He couldn't stand the thought of _cheating_ on Fai, betraying him by opening his body to someone else. It was one thing if it was just business - furthering the aim of protecting them both - but if it was just for his own indulgence? It was impossible.

And a third part of him was appalled that he was even considering it in the first place. He was a criminal and a fugitive, on the run from all the law he had ever known into the wild unknown of out-system space, his brother was sick and sleeping and crazy, and here he was worrying about _dalliance. _

So he hadn't approached Kurogane again, and he watched anxiously for the man's reactions, to see if he was offended or angry by Fai's refusal. But the big man hadn't said anything, hadn't made any move to pressure him or even shown any disappointment. Did he just not care at all? Or what? He was a tough shell to crack, his guarded glower defying all of Yuui's guesses.

"We always use the Mino controlled airspace instead of the Kajitori," Syaoran explained cheerfully, breaking into Yuui's thoughts. "They're smaller, and out of the way, and a little more expensive, but they're also more private. And the views are wonderful! Would you like to see?"

Yuui's heart lifted. "Could I?" he said hopefully, glancing back at the displays.

"Oi," Kurogane said sharply, looking up from his own panel. "Some of us are trying to do _work_ here, you know. This is business, not tourism."

"It'll just be for a moment, and just the big screens," Syaoran returned. He stood from his pilot's chair with one hand on the ceiling bar for balance, reaching above the bulky row of cabinet-like consoles to flip some unseen switches. The text and graphics winked out from the glass windows on all side, to be replaced by the deep, star-shot blackness of space.

Yuui shivered, feeling once again the bone-deep fear of that endless void, the vertigo of falling forever and the claustrophobic terror of vacuum… but only for a moment, before his attention was captured by the vast, softly glowing orb of Mars above them.

It took up half the screen, hanging sideways and slightly above them; the planetary curve was just barely visible at the edges, tinged by the ozone-blue haze of the atmosphere. Yuui drifted forward, staring in avid fascination at the first new world he'd ever seen.

The surface was awash in colors and patterns, slashed by broad white bands of ice-water clouds. The predominant color was a sort of light salmon-orange of rock and sand, wrinkled by darker bands of mountain ranges or deep gorges far more massive than any found on Earth. The northern pole was capped with brilliant white, and gleaming smooth ice-fields crept outwards across the hemisphere in irregular sheets that would one day be oceans.

But here and there, especially around the equator, were the dark grey-green smudges of Mars' primitive forests, planted and nurtured by the massive terraforming that pulled the planet inexorably away from the cold desert it had been and breathed new life into the world. Light flashed and twinkled along the horizon, as the planet turned from nightside into daylight; Yuui squinted a bit and was able to make out the corrugated gray spread of a major city nestled along the equator.

"That's Olympia, in the Tharsis sector," Syaoran supplied for him, saving Yuui the embarrassment of trying to remember his areography from school. "It's named for the mountain, but of course it's not _on_ the mountain - there's a shuttle that runs on weekdays, though, you can make a day trip of it. I went once on a school trip. But if you want to know more you should really ask Sakura. She grew up in the city, I only visited there a few times."

"It's incredible," Yuui said with feeling, but then found himself at a loss to say more. He groped for words to express his awe, his wonder, at being confronted with a whole new horizon unlike anything he'd ever seen or imagined. "I'd expected something… more red."

Kurogane snorted, and Syaoran laughed. "Well, when I went to Earth, I was expecting it to be all blue," he said.

"After three hundred years of global industrialization?" Yuui asked. "Really?"

"From a distance it still looks blue, just like from a distance Mars looks red," Syaoran said. "The first stage of terraforming locked down a lot of the iron oxide in the air - we only get rust storms sometimes now, and everything looks a _lot_ redder then. But the iron harvesting crawlers have been at work now for over a century, you know. Mars is changing."

Syaoran put his hand on the display and looked out over his homeworld, a distant look in his eyes and a wistful little smile on his face. "Mars is changing," he repeated in a quieter voice, his soft voice a strange combination of joy and sorrow. "A little bit every day. I'll never see it complete, but it will never be like it was, either."

"I wish I could go and see it," Yuui said, turning back to the display. A whole new world… it wasn't Earth, but that wasn't a bad thing.

"Well, why don't you?" Syaoran asked. "We usually go downside at least once while we're here - we're on the wrong side of the planet to visit my family, but there's still lots to see. The Mokona will be in dock for at least a couple of days, right?" He looked at Kurogane.

"Yeah," the captain grunted, flipping open a thin electronic notebook and scrolling through it.

"I couldn't," Yuui said, startled by the suggestion even as a hopeful surge lifted in his chest. "I mean - it would be dangerous, wouldn't it? I'd have to go through security, and - and I'm sure they're still looking for us -"

"This is Mars, son," Kurogane said sardonically. "There's more than one way to get down to the planet's surface."

"Besides, the Martian security database is separate from Earth's," Syaoran put in. "And they don't extradite criminals to Earth anyway. We've never had any problem with _Earth_ security here."

Yuui wondered if that meant that they had problems with _Mars_ security instead, but his mind was thrown into tumult by the unexpected offer. The prudent part of his brain told him to hang back, stay out of sight, on the ship where it was safe. But the rest of him seized gleefully on the chance to get out of this crowded tin can before he suffocated. He was growing more comfortable on the Mokona, and was endlessly grateful to its crew for taking him in and offering him and his brother protection… but it was a small ship, and his room was a cupboard. Sometimes he felt like the walls were pressing in on him, squeezed inwards by the ominous weight of the vacuum outside… physically it was the opposite, he knew, but he couldn't shake the choking sensation.

"I'd like that," he said. "I'd really like that."

"Great!" Syaoran cheered. "Just as soon as we get our flight plan cleared with the Mino, we can get going."

"Get going where?" Sakura's head poked above the control room's hatch, strands of ginger hair flying everywhere. "Oh, so here's everyone! I was wondering why the ship was so empty. Are we having a trip?"

"Yuui wants to go downside," Syaoran said. "I thought I'd go with him to Olympia, since I won't have anything to do once our flight plan is booked. Will you come?"

Sakura's face screwed up in indecision, then settled into a disappointed pout. "Not this time," she said. "I have to do some maintenance on the engine block if we're going to go on a long out-system trip. We aren't stopping anywhere in the Belt, are we?" She climbed the rest of the way into the control room and leaned against the railing, gazing at the high-definition display of Mars turning gently in space.

"Shouldn't," Kurogane said. "We're going directly to Jovian space, and there aren't any Belt nodes to speak of on our route this time of year."

"Then I really ought to get this done today," Sakura said. "And I really don't want to risk running into anyone who might know me in Olympia. But if you make a second trip later, I'll definitely want to come!"

"Oh, speaking of which, what's our next cargo going to be?" Syaoran wanted to know. "You haven't already booked it yet, have you?"

"Not yet," Kurogane replied. "Going to set up a meeting with our next client while you two are out of the way."

"Who with?" Sakura wanted to know.

There was a long moment of silence before Kurogane grudgingly let out, "With the Triads. They've been trying to get me to do them a cargo for years now."

"With the _Triads?"_ Sakura stood bolt upright, staring at the captain, as Syaoran turned around in his chair so fast his neck audibly cracked.

"Captain, are you serious?" Syaoran said in astonishment. "You've never dealt with them directly before! Three-fourths of everything they export is black-market pharmaceuticals!"

"Drugs, yeah," Kurogane said in a reserved voice. "There's a three thousand percent profit margin for narcotics right now on Ganymede station -"

"But, Captain, you've never run drug cargoes before!" Sakura protested. "You always said you wouldn't deal in poisons! Why would you suddenly change your mind?"

"This isn't a democratic process," Kurogane snarled. "My ship, my decisions; it's none of you guys' business why!"

Yuui's surprise at the captain's unexpected announcement was eclipsed by a jolt of comprehension - Kurogane was covering for him. He was protecting Fai's privacy by refusing to reveal to the kids what Yuui had told him about the tox screens. "It's all right," he said suddenly, and Syaoran and Sakura's surprised gazes transferred to him instead.

He fought the urge to squirm under their wide, innocent eyes, and he couldn't help but look down at the deck plates as he mumbled, "It's for my brother. For Fai. He - because of all the things they did to him, back in the labs," he had to swallow hard to continue. "He's addicted to a lot of different compounds. I want - to cure him, but he's going to need more of the drugs while he gets off of them."

Sakura made a little "oh!" sound, while Syaoran sat back in his chair, eyes wide. "But is it going to be all right - to take stuff from the shipment?" he said, his voice concerned.

"That's why the Triads," Kurogane admitted unwillingly. "They always throw in a bonus for their dealers. It should be plenty for what your brother needs."

"But Captain, the Triads are -" Sakura started, and Kurogane cut over her.

"I'll talk to them," he said, in an iron tone that left no room for argument.

"Oh," Sakura said. She and Syaoran exchanged a long, troubled look, and Yuui wondered what it was about the Triads that Kurogane didn't want to talk about. Aside from the obvious part about doing business with a sinister organization of smugglers, assassins and thieves, of course.

He'd heard the name before, of course, but only in the context of wild stories and shadowy rumors. The basics - that they were a high-powered crime syndicate on Mars - seemed likely enough. Organized crime was a reality; the Japanese Yakuza, the American Mafia, the Italian Cosa Nostra were only three of the most modern examples. But some of the things that got said about them - that they were responsible for the downfall of Old China, that every member of their organization was marked with an elaborate tattoo, that they routinely blew up ships or bombed city blocks to get back at individuals who had crossed them, heedless of how many innocents were caught in the crossfire - seemed beyond the pale. Every crime or suspicious death on Mars, and many on Earth, was attributed to the mysterious Triads - surely much of it had to be exaggerated, simply because no one could be everywhere all the time!

Somehow, though, this didn't seem the time to ask.

"Well," Sakura said, forcing cheer through the suddenly frigid atmosphere of the control room. "I'll just… go get started on that engine work then!"

"I'll help you," Syaoran added hastily, and the two teenagers scrambled down the hatch in almost undignified haste.

It was the first time Yuui and Kurogane had been alone together all week, and Yuui's pulse was suddenly much too loud in the silence. "I, ah," he said. "I'll get ready to go downside, shall I? First time seeing a new planet and all that."

"Do that," Kurogane said, not looking up from his control screen.

"Captain, I -" Yuui stumbled, for once not attaching any frivolous nicknames to the title. "I really appreciate what you're doing for him. For us. I know that it's not something you're happy about, and I'm really grateful. If there's anything -"

"Don't be stupid," Kurogane cut him off, looking up long enough to give him a glare that would curdle milk. "Watch out for yourself."

He returned pointedly to his work, shutting Yuui out of his attention. "Okay," Yuui said to the room at general. "I promise," he added, and followed Sakura and Syaoran out of the control room.

* * *

><p>Once the shuttle had detached and Kurogane finally had some quiet to work with, he shut down the flight plan he'd been working with and began setting up the meeting he was not looking forward to.<p>

Another advantage of staying in the Mino space lanes, out of the bulk stream of traffic, was that it put them in moon shadow; it was possible to bounce a signal off the smaller moon and create a very nearly untraceable connection. The positioning allowed for much better business secrecy, as well as better security. Not, Kurogane thought darkly, that he would have flown in Kajitori space or given them a single yen of his money willingly no matter _what_ advantages their company had to offer.

He sent out the initial ping and sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the armrest as he waited. There would be an inevitable delay as the recipient of the message verified who he was and dug up someone appropriate to field his call, but he didn't expect the wait to be long; they'd been wanting to hear from him for a long time, after all. On the other hand, it would be just like them to keep him dangling in order to hammer home his position - not long enough that he could justify giving up and doing something else, but long enough to make him angry.

Well, angrier, anyway.

His mind wandered back to his blond passenger, much to his internal exasperation. Wasn't the man a thorn in the side at all hours anyway, without intruding on his thoughts when he wasn't even onboard? But he was such a mix of contradictions; quick yet ignorant, fragile-looking yet insanely powerful, abrasive and then unexpectedly vulnerable. He hadn't approached Kurogane again after that night they'd argued about the drugs, and he wasn't sure whether to be glad or sorry. At least he was no longer trying to sell himself out at every opportunity, and yet Kurogane kind of regretted the missed opportunities.

Oh, well. He'd made his position clear; the ball was firmly in the idiot's court. The last thing Kurogane intended to do was press the issue - that would only muddle the message he was trying to send. And it wasn't like he didn't have better things to think about at the moment.

He heard the hiss of the cabin door behind him, and glanced over his shoulder as Sakura swung up over the railing. "Oi," he said. "I'm conducting negotiations here. I don't want them to see you."

"It'll be at least ten minutes before they get back to you," Sakura said with certainty. "This won't take long. There's just something I want to upload while we're still connected to the main planetary network."

Something in the tone of her voice caught Kurogane's attention, and he swung his chair around to scrutinize her as she seated herself at the engineer's station and began accessing the terminal. Her mouth had an unusually serious slant to it, and there was a faint shadow of worry on her forehead.

"All right," he said. "So what's the real reason you didn't go planetside with the kid and the idiot? You know Mars security wouldn't bother you, and there's no risk that anyone in Olympia would recognize you in person."

Sakura flickered a look up at him, then back down at the screen. "I had a feeling I had better stay up here," she said quietly.

Kurogane felt his spine stiffen. "You had a feeling or a 'feeling?' " he asked intently. "Did you see something happening?"

"No," she said, but then immediately changed it to "Yes. Maybe - oh, I don't know. Not - not on this shopping trip specifically."

"Something else, then?" Kurogane pressed her. "The Triads? I can still break off this deal now, but the further it goes, the more dangerous it will be to back out."

"No, the deal seems fine - I think. I'm just getting a bad feeling about this whole stopover in general. The sooner we finish our business and leave, the better I'll feel." She looked up and flashed him a wan smile, hands twisting in her lap. "Maybe I'm just overreacting, or making things up, I don't know. Mars always makes me feel a little uncomfortable, but this - this is different somehow. I wish I could tell you exactly where the danger is coming from. But I just don't know!"

In the three years since Sakura and Syaoran had come on board, it had proven damn useful sometimes to have a precognitive as part of the crew. Her 'feelings' had steered them out of more than one dangerous situation. However, just because it was a useful talent didn't mean it wasn't also a very frustrating one. Her warnings were often muzzy and unclear, and trying to get specific information out of them usually just left Sakura more confused and doubting her own visions.

"I'm not surprised," he said in a neutral tone. "There's been nothing but trouble since we took that idiot and his guest on board. Can you tell if we'll be safe _after_ we leave Mars space?"

Sakura frowned, concentrating intensely, then lifted her head and shrugged helplessly. "I don't know," she said. "I don't feel anything as strongly, not good or bad, but - but I've been seeing some awfully strange things from after that time. I mean, making even less sense than usual."

She keyed up something on her console, and a datafile sprang to life on her screen. Kurogane stood up and crossed the cabin to look over her shoulder. His eyebrows rose in surprise despite himself. "What is this?" he said. "Astronomical archives? Planetary survey data? What does this have to do with anything?"

"I don't know, Sir." Sakura shrugged. "Most of the time I just see flashes - little snippets of a daily routine without any context. Twice now I've seen myself looking at this file. I don't know why, but it feels like a _good_ future - one we should go towards, not away. So I thought I should load the file while we have a planetary datalink, just so Mokona will have it."

Kurogane started to speak, but the captain's console bleeped insistently at him, and he hastened back to his chair. "Out of the cabin," he told Sakura firmly, as M0K0NA's avatar informed him that the conference he'd requested could now be initiated. He didn't turn around, but a quick scamper of light feet and the hissing of the cabin door told him he'd been obeyed - just as he liked it.

The room that came up on the other side of the screen was carefully blank, a grey-toned conference room devoid of any identifying features. That much was expected, but Kurogane frowned as he took in the image of the woman seated across the vidscreen from him. She was a stranger to him, but there was something naggingly familiar about her features.

The woman had dark hair, cut in a distinctive slanting style from the left side to the right, and attractive Asian features. Her clothes were aggressively businesslike, as grey as the room she sat in and with broad shoulders to accentuate her presence, and expensive-looking gems glittered in her ears. She smiled when she saw him, an artificial smile showing rows of pearly white teeth.

"Greetings, Suwa no You-ou," she began, not waiting for him to speak. "The family is delighted to receive overtures from you at last."

Kurogane gritted his teeth. "Don't call me that," he said in a taut, low tone that barely suppressed his murderous rage. He was doubly glad now that he'd evicted Sakura from the room; she didn't know him by that name. _Nobody_ should have known him by that name, and the only thing that kept him from cutting the conversation right then and there was that she _probably_ hadn't known how badly it would piss him off.

"Why not?" She actually sounded a little surprised and, God help her, amused by his evident anger. "There is no reason to be ashamed or hide from that name. That clan had a great and noble lineage, and that individual had a brave and remarkable history."

If he ever had any doubts about what kind of cold-blooded bastards he was dealing with, Kurogane thought cynically, the type of person who could describe that incident as 'brave and remarkable' instead of any other adjectives would just about hammer it home. "I don't. Do business. Under that name," he said, biting off each syllable distinctly. "My name is _Kurogane_, and that's the only one you're going to get a deal out of today."

As though he would seriously soil the name his parents had given him by using it for smuggling and drug-running. Kurogane… Kurogane was a different person, and it didn't count.

"Very well, Ship's Captain Kurogane," the woman said, her eyelashes sweeping down over her cheeks. "If you insist. If you came to join our ranks, of course, you would need feel no shame in using your family's name."

_I'll bet,_ Kurogane thought bitterly, but did not say aloud. Instead he said, "What happened to Xing Hua? She was the one I always dealt with before."

The woman's demeanor abruptly went icy-cold. "Xing Hua is no longer with us," she snapped.

"What, you mean she's dead?" Kurogane said, somewhat taken aback. "Or what?"

"She _believed_ that it would be more beneficial for her to join forces with Earth's dirtsucking Minister of Space than to remain loyal. She _believed _ that she had more to fear from Fei Wong Reed than she did from us." The woman regained her composure somewhat, and her subsequent icy smile little smile made Kurogane's belly go cold. "She will be proven wrong."

"Sorry to hear it," Kurogane said, completely insincerely; he let the implied threat of what happened to deserters wash off his back. After all, he didn't work for the Triads. Yet. "Who are you?"

"My name is Sonomi," she said briskly.

Kurogane's lingering, bitter fury was abruptly swept away as the sense of familiarity clicked into place. "Amamiya Sonomi?" He couldn't keep the startlement out of his voice. "Then you're Masaki's -"

"Grandfather was most interested when he heard you had actually initiated contact with us this time," Sonomi interrupted. "Of course, we are always happy to honor such a treasured ally. You will want a face-to-face meeting, then to arrange the terms of the contract."

"I haven't agreed to any _contract_ yet," Kurogane shot back. "I said I'd be interested in _one_ job. No strings attached."

"Certainly," Sonomi said in a slightly chillier voice. "If that continues to be your wish. We shall set up a meeting for three Martian days from now, then. We will transmit the location of the meeting to your ship on the appointed day."

"Why wait so long?" Kurogane said. The planetary rotation of Mars was close enough to Earth's that most close-space business kept approximately the same clock; seventy-two hours seemed like an excessive delay. Especially given Sakura's bad 'feelings,' he didn't really want to be stuck here that long.

"Your drop shuttle is currently downside, along with two of your crew," Sonomi told him pleasantly; it wasn't a question. "We are simply giving you time to get prepared."

"They'll be back by tonight," Kurogane said. "I can meet you tomorrow."

Sonomi blinked at him in apparent innocence. "Can you really guarantee that they'll be back on time?" she cooed sweetly. "After all, Mars is dangerous. Anything could happen to them down there."

"Now wait just a damn -" Kurogane started.

"Three days, Captain Kurogane, will give you plenty of time to consider our offer. We will see you then." The screen blinked off.

* * *

><p>The skies of Mars were as crowded as those over Earth, despite the fact that Mars had only a half its size and a tiny fraction of the population. But the volume of satellites, stations, orbital and sub-orbital traffic made the smaller atmosphere of Mars seem lively and cluttered. By contrast, the surface of Mars was almost pristine; huge swathes of rolling, virgin land were only intermittently decorated by roads or cities. Earth had built from the ground up; Mars had built from the sky down.<p>

And the sky, Yuui marveled through the windows of the shuttle as Syaoran piloted it down to the surface, was as blue as he'd ever seen it on Earth.

The city of Olympia followed the same principle of design, buildings surging upwards to take advantage of every cubic meter of available space. The city was capped by a dome, and the limits of the glass circumscribed how far out they could build; they could always add onto the dome, and they did, but in the meantime the city grew to fill its confines like a pot-bound plant. Buildings and roadways stacked in layers, cluttering up the sky to almost obscure the sight of the dome overhead and plunging into deep subway tunnels below.

Syaoran seemed happy to play tour guide, and as the morning progressed - the light of the sun and the two mirrored moons dim by comparison to the lights of the city itself - he took them around all the most attractive and historic places to see. They rested for a few minutes in the city's largest garden - 'largest' being a relative term, since it seemed quite modest to Yuui. The greenery was all native earth-plants, and it made him feel a surge of nostalgia - not quite homesickness, as he had no desire to go back - for Hong Kong. That great city had parks of its own, which Yuui well remembered - there had been more than one night where he and his twin had camped out there, not daring to go home…

"Are you all right, Yuui-san?" Syaoran asked him conscientiously.

Yuui jolted back to himself, and gave the boy a bright smile. "I'm fine, it's just been a while since breakfast," he said easily. "Can we stop somewhere and get something to eat?"

"Sure!" Syaoran leapt to his feet with the enthusiasm of the young, and Yuui followed him out of the park and down a side street into a maze of narrow streets. "I know this place, they have really great Earth-style cakes and pastries."

"Earth-style?" Yuui asked, puzzled. "Does Mars still import a lot of food from Earth, then? I thought -"

"Oh, Mars is completely self-sufficient by now," Syaoran said proudly. "We can grow anything we need on the farms, and make anything we want in the cities. But there's still a market for Earth imports, you know, as a luxury…"

Indeed, the area of town they were entering seemed to have a lot of Earth 'novelty' shops. They passed by one large glass storefront bearing the sign 'Terra Miscellanea' in intricate script - Yuui caught a glimpse of a large, claw-footed bathtub crammed with a set of golf clubs. "FOR DISPLAY ONLY," the blazing sign above them read, although it was unclear which item it was referring to.

They rounded a corner and came face to face with a quaint-looking storefront. A plate-glass window outlined a collection of cakes and cupcakes so elaborately decorated that Yuui couldn't imagine actually eating them. _Twin Crullers,_ proclaimed the name of the store above the entryway, and a tiny bell tinkled somewhere as they pushed open the door.

A tall woman in an apron-fronted dress, long black hair spilling over her shoulders, appeared from some back room. "_Hun ying, hun ying… _Oh, excuse me," she said, reverting to accented English as she caught sight of Yuui's blond hair. "Can I help you find something? We have only the finest cakes and cookies, made with real Earth flour…"

"It's all right," he said, smiling warmly at her. "Cantonese is fine - I grew up in Hong Kong. Thank you, but we're just looking around for now. We'll call you if we need anything, miss...?"

"Matsumoto," she said, smiling back. "Maki Matsumoto. I am the owner of the store, so if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask. We can also do special orders. Are you looking for something to remind you of home?"

"Nothing in particular," he said, and then laughed. "Besides, it all looks so delicious. I don't know how I can choose!"

Syaoran was browsing along a row of sculpted sugar pastries when Yuui joined him. He looked up and smiled. "Yuui-san, you should choose something you like," he said. "This one's on me."

The price tag on a couple of the cakes caught Yuui's eye, and his inner child - the one who had gazed longingly at much simpler buns and rolls in the street market - quailed. "Are you sure it's all right?" he said. "They're awfully expensive…"

"Don't worry about it, Yuui-san," Syaoran said with a smile. "The Captain pays us well, and we don't get many opportunities to spend it. Even expensive cakes are still pretty cheap, compared to other things. And this is your first time on Mars! You deserve something special!"

Eventually they settled on a slice of thick chocolate cake, the top spread with glazed raspberry icing, on Yuui's insistence that they would share it. While they waited for Miss Matsumoto to bag and seal the cake, Yuui caught Syaoran's eye running over the rows of confections with a longing in his eye that had nothing to do with hunger.

"Are you going to buy one to take back to Sakura?" Yuui prompted helpfully. "She might like that."

"Oh, do you think so?" Syaoran turned to Yuui with relief. "I'm just not sure which one she'd like the most. They're all so beautiful…"

"How about this one?" Yuui moved down to the end of the row, pointing to a cluster of small cupcakes frosted and decorated in the shape of animals. The closest one to them was in the shape of a bear, small black eyes and tiny lines delimiting the mouth, and large round ears. "They're awfully cute, and they look delicious."

"They are!" Syaoran said, leaning over to admire them. "And she loves animals. Thank you, Yuui-san, I'll get these."

For a moment Yuui lingered over the row of pastries, wishing he could bring something back for Fai… but he had no way of knowing when Fai was going to be able to wake up, and he'd likely be in no condition to appreciate sweets when he did. He sighed and turned back to his companion. "What about the captain? Should we bring him souvenirs? He's Japanese, after all," Yuui said.

Syaoran laughed. "We might pick up something else later, but the Captain absolutely hates sweet things," he said as they gathered their packages and left the store.

"Oh, really?" Yuui said. A spark of mischief flared in his brain. "You know, maybe we should go shopping for some supplies before we go back up to the ship. Right now we don't have the right kind of flour, or enough sugar to make it practical, but I could try my hand at some baking recipes. We have to show Captain Killjoy what he's missing, after all…"

"Really?" Syaoran gave him a wide-eyed stare of amazement. "You can do that? But the gallery doesn't even have a proper oven, let alone muffin tins or a springform pan… We just don't have the space to spare for baking equipment."

"Oh, you'd be amazed what you can bake up in a simple microwave oven," Yuui told him airily. "As long as you're not trying anything especially complicated, like flaky tarts or anything that has to rise especially. But I could certainly turn out simple cookies or cakes."

"I never thought of that!" Syaoran shook his head wonderingly. "My brother - Kimihiro - he's a fantastic cook, and he bakes, too. His croissants were just incredible. His kitchen was always half-full of special baking stuff, and I never imagined you could bake without needing them."

"We should stock up on ingredients before we leave today, then," Yuui said, beginning to feel cheerful at the prospect. "After all, who knows how long it'll be before we next make planetf-"

He cut himself off midsentence as something flickered in the corner of his eye. He whipped his head around just in time to see two dark silhouettes disappear down the nearest alley. Unnerved, he turned his head straight again, in time to see Syaoran looking at him in puzzlement.

"Yuui-san? Is something wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," he said, trying to make his voice sound normal and not as shaken as he felt. "Um… let's head back towards the shuttle, how about that? We can eat the cake there."

"Why? I thought you wanted to go shopping some more," Syaoran said in confusion. "There aren't any stores on the way back to the -" He broke off as his head swung behind them, and Yuui didn't have to turn around to know that the shadowy figures were back.

"They're following us, aren't they?" Yuui said quietly.

"Um…" Syaoran said, which wasn't the most encouraging of responses. "This way, Yuui-san - keep it to a walk until we round the corner."

Yuui tried to keep to a normal pace, even as terror buzzed in his head and made his chest feel tight. They'd found him, somehow - who knew how? He shouldn't have told Miss Matsumoto that he was from Hong Kong, that narrowed things down too much. He should never have come planetside, he should never have taken the risk. "I thought you said the Mars security network wasn't tied into the Earth one," he said tightly to Syaoran.

"It isn't," Syaoran said. "Not directly, anyway. I'm not sure this is - I need to get a better look at them."

They rounded the corner then, and Yuui hardly needed Syaoran's urging to break into a run. The two of them pounded down the alleyway, blood thudding in Yuui's ears as they ran. Only two - or only two that they'd seen? Yuui had no doubt he could take out just two men, no matter what weapons they carried, but police were like cockroaches; where you saw one, a dozen more were lurking just out of sight. He would never be able to kill -

Horrified, Yuui brought his train of halt to a screeching stop. Killing - again? It was just like Kurogane had accused him of, he reverted to killing his enemies because it was so _easy._ Because he didn't know what else to do. "What should we do?" he asked Syaoran, panting.

Syaoran skidded to a stop, his neck cranked backwards. He gestured wildly at the roof of catwalks above them. "We need to get higher up!" he said. "There's a fire escape right there - if you can give me a lift so I can grab it and pull it down -"

Without a second thought Yuui reached up and grabbed the trapdoor with his telekineses; metal shrieked as he yanked the ladder down to their level.

"Oh," Syaoran said, giving him a look of startled respect. "Or you could do that, yeah."

Yuui and Syaoran swarmed quickly up the ladder to the next level; Yuui took a moment to drag the ladder back up behind him. The fire escape went up several stories, and then abruptly flattened out into a wide series of walkways - the city's second-story street-level.

"Earth must have sent out the APB along all the interplanetary channels," Syaoran said. "They don't normally do that - it costs a fortune - they must want you really bad!"

_It's not me they want so badly,_ Yuui thought grimly, although he saved his breath for running. Although he supposed it might have been; with the sheer number of deaths he had racked up behind him, the Feds must be howling for his blood.

"I don't know this part of the city as well," Syaoran confessed, "but if we stay above them, they should-"

Syaoran jerked to a stop, and Yuui skidded along loose gravel behind him - it took a quick expenditure of their power not to tip over the side. The roof above them abruptly dropped away, the road opening like a canyon in front of them.

Their shadowy pursuers were on the roof across from them, waiting for them. They were both tall, one blond and one black-haired, wearing dark coats that fell almost to their ankles. Despite the dimness of the sunlight that managed to filter through the dome and the haze overhead, they were both wearing sunglasses.

The shorter blond one lifted his arm; something in his hand flashed brightly. A camera? A signal flare? A tracer? Yuui wondered dizzily. If they jumped, could his power protect Syaoran from the fall…?

"Okay," Syaoran said, grabbing his arms tightly. "Don't panic. I know what this is. Just keep calm."

"How much more _calm_ do you _want me to be?"_ Yuui said, fighting the hysterical laughter that tried to bubble up in his throat. "We're being chased by Fed goons and -"

"It's _not_ the Feds," Syaoran said forcefully. "Calm _down._ Listen. This is local security, and that means everything's going to be okay."

"How?"

"Listen to me. Just… Yuui-san, you need to use your talent."

Yuui stared at him uncomprehendingly. "To do what?" he said. "To jump? Or I could - I could pull them over the edge if that's what you -"

"No, _definitely not!"_ Syaoran said sharply. "To - just do something so that they can see. Something that makes it obvious that _you're_ the one doing it. Here - " He thrust the plastic bags from the bakery into Yuui's hands. "Make these float."

Now utterly confused, Yuui raised his hands slightly and levitated the bags. It was easy - easy enough, in fact, that it was hard to restrain his panic-fueled power not to send the pastries skyrocketing through the dome. "What will this do?" he said in a choked voice.

"Okay, that's enough. You can stop now." Syaoran nodded over towards the other street. "Look."

The shorter thug had lowered his hand, and both of them had taken off their sunglasses. When they were certain both Yuui and Syaoran were looking at them, the taller one nodded once.

And then they both turned and walked away into the alleyway.

After a short pause, Yuui asked, "What just happened? Have they - have they gone to get reinforcements?"

"No. We should be okay now." Syaoran took a deep breath, and exhaled shakily. "We should go back to the ship now. I'll explain on the way."

As they turned away, a bleeping noise sounded from Syaoran's pocket. He slapped it, then pulled out his mocom; it had the blinking light of a waiting message. He read it, and pulled a wry face.

"What is it?" Yuui asked, confused and still shaken. As he picked up the pastry bags, he realized with some dismay that his mental grip had squashed the cake inside completely flat; it was oozing strawberry jam from the seams.

"It's for you," Syaoran said, handing the little machine over to him.

A text message was scrolling across the screen. In blinking green letters it read, WELCOME TO MARS MR FLOWRIGHT. ENJOY YOUR STAY.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	11. 9: searching for the future

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise - Chapter 9  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Fai/Yuui, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Although we are both working on all parts of the story, chapter nine was mostly written by Reikah and chapter ten was mostly written by me._

* * *

><p>"Things are kind of tense between Earth and Mars right now," Syaoran said as they walked back from the shopping district. They had a new round of pastries, as well as a few bags of baking supplies; Syaoran's repeated assurance that they would face no more harassment seemed to have been true enough.<p>

"I thought things were always tense between Earth and Mars," Yuui commented.

Syaoran laughed a little. "Well, that's true," he admitted. "But especially now. You were in the academy right? So you must know about the psychics - that so many more of them are born in space than on Earth."

"Yes," Yuui said, "although given how many more people Earth has, there are still plenty to choose from. I'm from Earth, after all."

"Yes, but people like you are incredibly rare," Syaoran said. "The percentage of potential espers goes up _exponentially_ in any of the space-born populations compared to the terrestrial ones. And since Mars has more people than any other extraterrestrial colony, we are still the primary source for new psychic talent."

"Which means?" Yuui said warily.

Syaoran shrugged. "Mars is a lot friendlier than Earth to psychics in general. Of course, it helps that we don't have a large peacekeeping force to supply or too many contacts with deep-space colonies to maintain… but the fact is that Earth needs psychics, and they don't have enough. So they want ours."

"Oh." Yuui's mind went back to Sakura's chilling tale of kidnapping - he'd heard rumors that such things happened, of course, but nobody ever had any proof; it was just something that happened to a friend of a cousin of a friend. "So they steal them?"

Syaoran's pleasant face was unusually flat and grim. "The raids have really picked up in the past few years," he said. "But before that, they tried to be a little more subtle about it. They'd scope out a psychic they wanted, then come up with a bunch of false criminal charges and demand that Mars extradite them to Earth for trial. After they lost a couple dozen of espers to Earth that way - none of them ever seen again - the Martian government caught on. And now they simply refuse to extradite _any_ psychics to Earth, for _any_ reason."

"Oh," Yuui said, reviewing the past hour in this new light. "But - but I'm not Martian."

Syaoran shook his head. "That doesn't matter," he said. "I said Mars was friendlier to psychics than Earth - and right now they're so mad that they don't want to hand _any_ espers over to Earth, no matter where they're from. But at the same time they can't officially withhold Earth citizens from Earth justice - so they just quietly look the other way.

"Whenever someone comes in hot from Earth - like you did - and the Feds are demanding that Mars instigate a local search, the government just… sends out a few people, very discreetly, to find out if that person is a psychic on the run. And if they are, then they just pretend they never saw them."

"But doesn't that run the risk of letting real criminals run loose?" Yuui asked, guiltily aware that psychic or no, Earth's accusations of his 'terrorist' crimes had quite a lot of basis.

"Maybe," Syaoran said seriously. "But it's like this - if they commit crimes in _Mars_ space, the police will come down on them like the hammer of God. And if they really did commit crimes on Earth but none here, then it's not our job to do Earth's police work for them!

"Besides, the number of 'real criminals' who escape from Earth to Mars is much smaller than the number of innocent Martians they've kidnapped over the years - like Sakura." Syaoran's normally open, easy-going face hardened into a mask of hatred. "They'd still be looking for her, if they didn't think she was dead. They put _her_ face in the newsfaxes next to murderers, arsonists and rapists - and she never harmed a soul!"

"I see," Yuui murmured, hunching his shoulders and clasping his hands in front of him. "I had no idea that the Federal government was so - so ruthless."

And he should have known, just given their treatment of himself and his twin. But the truth was that up until they had taken Fai away from him, the Academy had given them more than they'd ever had in their lives - warm housing, steady food, comfortable clothes. An education. A _purpose,_ a chance to become more than a pair of worthless street rats. For all that they'd used and exploited Fai - and himself - a deep-down part of Yuui couldn't help but believe that they didn't deserve any better, and that they should be no more than grateful for the time and expense that Earth had spent on them.

But he _did _ know better now - now that he'd had a chance to get outside the system, see and hear about its abuses and excesses from other people's ears. And while it should have reassured him to know that running away had been the right move, it didn't make him feel any better to think of Earth's enraged fury at losing them.

"Don't worry about it," Syaoran reassured him, and Yuui realized that his usual pleasant expression must have slipped, revealing some of his worry. The boy patted his arm, anxiously trying to cheer him up. "That's on Earth. This is Mars now! You're far away from them, and they can't touch you any more."

Yuui gave him a small smile. "I suppose you're right," he said. "Come on, let's get back to the ship. The others will be waiting."

* * *

><p>When the shuttle pulled in both Kurogane and Sakura were waiting on the other side of the airlock; Sakura had her arms folded over her chest and her back to the wall, her expression a little shadowed, and Kurogane paced back and forth before the small door as the Mokona closed the shuttle bay doors and then pumped air back into the room.<p>

Syaoran was the first out, wearing his EVA suit but no helmet, clutching a couple of bags; Yuui followed in his civilian clothes, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes at the blond's overconfidence. It was wildly irresponsible not to take your suit on an orbit-to-surface shuttle flight, but just like an Earther to forget his suit in his cabin. Stupid, Kurogane thought.

"Syaoran," Sakura said with some relief when the two of them opened the doors. "Are you alright?"

"I - I'm fine, Princess," Syaoran said, looking a little flushed at her regard, and Kurogane snorted. "Did we hear from the triads? When is the meeting?"

"Three days," Kurogane said, scowling. "They want us to sit on our thumbs and sweat."

"Is that normal?" Yuui wanted to know. He had several bags too, and he shifted uncertainly in the corridor behind Syaoran.

"Depends," Kurogane said. "Normal business practice, no. But if you mean 'is it something to worry about,' also no. It's just bullshit power games."

"So we just hang in orbit until they're ready to meet with us?" Syaoran asked, and Kurogane nodded. "The Security Services know we're here, Captain... is that really okay?" His eyes flicked to Yuui, who bit his lower lip, and Kurogane let out a long sigh.

"Should be," he said. "They won't sell you out to Earth, and the triads won't either. For all their faults," he said bitterly, "they're Martian to the bone."

"If you're sure," Yuui said, but he looked doubtful. "What are we supposed to do for three days?"

"What we did for the last ten," Kurogane said. "Wait. There's a lot of waiting in space travel; you'll get used to it. Don't recommend you go shopping again, though."

"Oh!" This seemed to trigger Syaoran's memory, and he fumbled, one-handed, in the bags he had hooked over his wrist for a small white cardboard box; he held this out to Sakura, blushing furiously. "Th - that's for you. I hope you like it."

"What is it?" Sakura asked, her brow furrowing even as she opened it, and Kurogane was startled to feel Yuui nudge him.

"We bought some new stuff," the blond said. "I'm going to put it in the galley - you should come too, Captain Third Wheel."

"Huh?" Kurogane asked, and Yuui sighed and put on a long-suffering look.

"Let's leave your young crewmembers together, _yes_?" he said, and Kurogane jerked, coloring as he realized what Yuui was after; Syaoran gave them a slightly pleading look. Yuui took some of the bags from him with a grin and turned on his heel, and he was walking down the corridor as Sakura finished opening in the box and squealed in delight. Kurogane rather hastily followed him.

He opted to follow Yuui into the galley - Sakura's voice raised in excitement behind him until the door hissed shut after them - and stood for a moment inside the doorway, uncertain. Normally he'd use the opportunity to use the machines or practice sword play, but he didn't feel up to that with Yuui present, and he didn't think it would be fair to toss the blond out. Yuui seemed at home in the kitchenette, unloading strange and arcane items from the bags and putting them in cupboards.

Kurogane tilted his head to one side as his passenger went back to unloading more bags, including white boxes not unlike the one Syaoran had presented Sakura with. "You're in a good mood today," he said, keeping his voice level, and didn't say what he was thinking: _what happened that you forgot yourself_?

"Well," said Yuui. "We had a run in with Martian security and I am, as yet, unarrested. I'm a little relieved by that, you could say. I made my twin a promise concerning capture."

"Oh?"

"It's none of your business, Captain Nosey," Yuui said lightly, and Kurogane scowled as he poked through the bags.

"What the hell is this stuff?" Kurogane asked, confused, lifting a small plastic... thing. It looked like a hydraulic pump, but much too small and fragile.

"If it's got a nozzle, it's an icing piper," said Yuui, bent down to rummage through the cupboards. "Please don't move it, I'm planning on experimenting with cakes later."

"We don't have room for all this," Kurogane complained.

"Don't underestimate my packing abilities, Captain Nitpick," Yuui countered. He finished emptying the bags and rummaged in a drawer for a fork, opening one of the boxes on the countertop to reveal a slice of chocolate cake, decorated with whipped cream and glazed cherries, and Kurogane recoiled away from it instinctively. Yuui's eyes lit up, however, and it transformed his face.

"How can you eat that stuff?" Kurogane demanded.

"With a fork, usually," Yuui replied. "A spoon is also a good idea. I could use my fingers, but that just gets messy."

"Tch," Kurogane growled, and Yuui scooped himself a slice of chocolate cake, putting it into his mouth; his whole face softened in obvious pleasure at the taste, and he slid the fork back out slowly, obviously cleaning every last shred of the cake from its tines with his tongue as he did so. Kurogane didn't think he was trying to be seductive, the gesture was unconscious and filled with a kind of quiet satisfaction rather than overt flirting like the times Yuui had tried to offer himself up, but it was damn arresting anyway.

Yuui looked up to meet his eyes, and Kurogane realized he'd been staring. Yuui grinned. "Jealous?" he asked with a sly wink.

"Hell, no," Kurogane said, turning sharply away and trying to calm the suddenly-kindled heat in his body. "Sweet shit like that makes my teeth ache just looking at it. Don't tell me you're going to fill up my galley with that junk."

Yuui laughed. "Don't worry, Captain Sourtooth," he said. "Not all desserts have to be sweet. I saw that you drink coffee - at least I hope you aren't letting the kids drink it, that would stunt their growth! - so I got the ingredients to make tiramisu. I thought you'd like that."

Kurogane grunted noncommittally, not wanting to admit that the idea actually sounded pretty good. Then he frowned and turned to the table again, looking Yuui square in the eye. "All right," he said. "What's this supposed to be?"

Yuui blinked several times, appearing at a loss. "What is what supposed to be?" he asked. "The… chocolate and coffee, and a shortbread…"

"Not the cake," Kurogane interrupted. "Look. This is a small ship, there's not really room for misunderstandings. So I'm just asking straight. The kid brings back a special cake for the girl because he wants to show her he cares, now you're talking about making some weird pastry that you think _I'd_like. What I want to know is, what message are you trying to send here?"

Yuui looked lost, stuttering as he answered. "I wasn't… trying to do anything like before," he said, and flushed. "I'm not trying to bribe you for favors or anything, I promise. I…"

"I didn't say you were," Kurogane said. "I just want to know if you're coming on to me or not."

"I… no," Yuui said, although the flush in his cheeks as he stared down at the table suggested that wasn't entirely truthful. "I just - you've been very kind to us, to me and Fai. I wanted to do something nice for you. That's all."

"You don't have to," Kurogane said sharply, just to dispel any notions of bribery or payment owed. But when Yuui only looked more hurt and annoyed, he added, "But if you still feel like making that tiramisu, I might have a bite. Just to see if it's any good."

He set himself down rather heavily upon the couch, flicking the television on with the buttons attached to its arm. The couch had been a recent purchase; the one before it had been too small to let him stretch out, and this one was bigger by it by a good four decimeters.

Normally he preferred to watch movies in his room; he had a stack of older video formats and outdated films he wanted to see. Now he took the opportunity to flick through the Martian channels - mostly reality television and chat shows; he settled on a film he liked and had seen a few times before - a dramatic retelling of the construction of the first great deep space station.

"I wouldn't have thought you'd be into older films," Yuui said, from across the room, and Kurogane snorted.

"My dad took me to see this one," he said. "We ordered it in from Mars special. You seen it?"

"No." Yuui paused, and Kurogane could hear the hesitation in his voice. "We didn't see many films. I didn't... we couldn't until we left home."

For some reason that _we_ nagged at Kurogane like it did most of the time Yuui used it, like he was only half a person. He would have dismissed it as a twin thing - he had never had any siblings himself, but he could see how it might be to grow up with one - but Syaoran rarely used _we_, defaulting to _Kimihiro and I_ or _me and my twin_.

"It's near the end," he said. "Too bad, you should watch it."

"Isn't that what I'm doing now?" Yuui retorted, but Kurogane heard the whisper of cloth as he got to his feet and came over, fork in one hand and box in the other, and settled himself on the arm of the sofa furthest away from Kurogane.

He stayed quiet while watching the movie, at least, and Kurogane took a small amount of pride in the fascinated excitement in his eyes during the climactic scene. Just when an outbound colony ship seemed like it would hit the bare-bones space station, it was saved by the movie's heroine - a young Japanese kinetic, stretching her gift past the breaking point and suffering an aneurysm after the ship was diverted. It was based on a true story; his father had once shown him the memorial plaque with her name on it on the space station walls.

"She must have been very strong," Yuui said softly as the credits rolled.

"Yeah," said Kurogane. "She was a hero."

"'Was'?" Yuui turned to him, tilting his head, and Kurogane turned away and shrugged.

"The station she saved is gone anyway," he said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. Figures that an Earthie wouldn't even know basic near-space history. "It was destroyed decades ago."

"Oh." Yuui paused, digesting this. "That's sad, but at least the people she saved got a few more years. It wasn't for nothing, was it?"

"She was prime material for Earth's propaganda machine," Kurogane said, ignoring this. "When they started up their Kinetic army. It was all 'join now and save lives like she did'. I guess they've moved beyond that if you don't know who she is."

"No." Yuui hesitated. "We didn't go to school, Captain, I... They didn't have to inspire me to join them by appealing to my need to be a hero or anything. For me it was 'join now and get three meals a day,' but for others we heard it was... it was 'join now or be lobotomized.'"

"What the hell?" Kurogane asked, sitting up straight. He hadn't heard that one, and his palms prickled. On the screen the credits were finishing to a stop, and he muted the television set absently as commercials for the next program started up. "I've never heard that."

"It's not like they said it outright. But yeah, if you didn't sign up then you had to be really careful, because the first time you did something wrong you'd get a laser burning out your frontal lobe." He twisted his fingers by his temples, mimicking smoke pouring out of his ears. "Unregistered, unaffliated espers were dangerous, they said."

"Fuck," said Kurogane, thinking of Sakura. He'd never asked why Syaoran and she had run; he'd thought they just hadn't wanted to lose their autonomy, and supported them fully. Now, though, he thought he understood a little more.

"Fai made me lie about what I could do. Maybe he'd heard the rumours." Yuui paused, raising a hand to his mouth, and bit thoughtfully at his thumbnail. "They didn't do it to him, whatever it is he can do."

"You honestly don't know?" Kurogane asked sharply, and Yuui shook his head.

"The man who discovered me let me bring him to their academy because he wanted to experiment on us," he said. "We're identical twins, we're rare enough in the normal population, among espers we were almost unique. The man... Professer Ashura, his name was - he was really really interested in how come I'm a kinetic and Fai wasn't. Fai and I did a lot of tests for him, and eventually they found out Fai was a clairvoyant.

"Thing is, clairvoyance is nothing special, not even on Earth. They say one in every ten women has it, particularly mature ones - all those mothers with the ability to know when something is happening to their kids, you know? Rarer among males, but not really rare enough to be remarkable.

"So they kept testing Fai, because I think they were hoping to find another power. A really strong one, like mine. And then one day they just... didn't send him back, after his tests, and I waited half an hour and I went to find them, and the Professor's chief lab assistant told me Fai had a rare medical condition and asked if he'd been having this... checklist of symptoms. And he had, so I said yes, because I was worried he'd had another seizure -"

"A seizure?" Kurogane interrupted sharply, and Yuui made a choppy, dismissive handwave.

"He used to have them sometimes when he was younger," Yuui said impatiently. "The hospital scanned him once when he was seventeen but they couldn't see anything wrong with him, and all the time we were at school and in the academy he was fine. Anyway, I said he had had the symptoms they were asking about before, and the lab technician told me... he said Fai was very very sick, and he wouldn't be coming back home for a while. And I said I wanted to see him, and he said I couldn't, and I knew he was lying."

"What happened next?" Kurogane asked, and Yuui snorted, the corners of his mouth turning up bitterly.

"You know I'm not very subtle by now. I trashed the lab. They sent another kinetic in to sedate me."

Wasn't that just typical. "Can't say I'm surprised," said Kurogane coolly, and Yuui flushed guiltily. The lighting from the screen made him look even more pale. "Do you have any idea what the hell it is that he can do?"

"No. I only have a few suspicions, like really powerful precognition. But I won't know until he wakes up, and I know he's not a kinetic, so the ship will be safe."

"Sakura's a precog," Kurogane pointed out. "She can't control it, but it doesn't hurt her."

"No, it shouldn't, but it's also not all that strong," Yuui said. He sat up and frowned, his expression slowly changing as his mind was distracted from his immediate problems. "Actually, Sakura ought to have more control than she does - a weaker talent is easier to control, not harder, since the time window you can see into is smaller. Hasn't she had any training for her gift at all?"

"When could she have gotten training?" Kurogane said in irritation. "She ran for her life. Did you expect us to just stop by your precious Academy one afternoon and say 'Pardon me, but we have an unregistered precog on board, do you think you could spare her some lessons?' "

Yuui raised his hands placatingly. "I didn't mean it like that," he said. "I just meant - Look, I spent a lot of time around the precogs when I was at the academy. I saw some of their training methods. They aren't actually all that difficult - it's not like free-fall training, where your trainer really has to be another kinetic. A lot of it is just certain routines and habits they keep, so that they always know when they are in time."

"So what?" Kurogane demanded; despite Yuui's reassurances, he still felt a bit nettled at the implication that he wasn't seeing to Sakura's welfare properly.

"So I could probably teach her some of the basic timekeeping and orientation routines, and even that would help her a lot." He looked up at Kurogane. "Would that be all right?"

"I don't know," Kurogane frowned. "It's her gift, not mine. If she's all right with it, then I don't care what you do."

"Okay. I'll talk to her when - ..." Yuui trailed off, and Kurogane glanced overly curiously to see him staring at the television screen, utterly expressionless; he followed his gaze to see a news bulletin, an immaculately coiffed Martian woman talking, muted, to the screen. The ticker along the bottom read _Earth's Eurasian Federation issue Trans-Solar Warrant for missing terrorist_.

Kurogane turned the sound up.

_"... face criticism from numerous authorities concerning their security procedure for the Lunar Colonies. Yuui Flowright, aged twenty-five, is alleged to be the son of an Illinois triple murderer sentenced to life imprisonment on the United States' "Romulus" Lunar camp. A spokesperson for Earth's United States had this to say on the killings, reportedly one of the highest body counts since the destruction of Suwa Space Station back in -"_

"They're talking about our mother," Yuui said, scowling.

"Your mother?" Kurogane asked, wrenching his attention from the television set.

"The triple murder case who escaped from the moon prison. They never could figure out how she got out."

_"- Senior Minister Fei Wang Reed confirmed that Flowright is to be considered extremely dangerous, and is in possession of esper abilities. The public is warned that he may be in possession of a large crate containing incendiary -"_

"Looks like they tracked your brother," Kurogane said, scowling at the bulletin. "Not like them to move that fast."

"Well, we're in Mars space, and Syaoran said -"

_"The Eurasian Federation would like to remind citizens of Sol that there is a five hundred thousand yenbuck bounty on Flowright alive, and half that dead. There is also a five hundred thousand yenbuck reward for the safe return of the crate. Earth authorities have issued a dossier on Flowright's troubled home life, including an interview with his father -"_

"Turn it off," said Yuui, in a voice colder than Kurogane had heard from him, but the screen flashed over anyway to a tall man, heavy set and shading to fat, his brown hair touched with grey. A ticker gave his name and listed him as 'Father of terrorist suspect', and Yuui made a noise like steam escaping from a pressure cooker, causing Kurogane to glance at him in surprise.

"Of course the boy is evil," said the man, seemingly in response to a question. He spoke in slow, measured Cantonese, subtitles at the bottom of the screen in Mandarin, Japanese and English. "All his life he was full of spite and hate, that is why I sent him to the academy. He tried to kill me."

" _Fuck you_," Yuui spat, his eyes flashing. His hands were tight fists on his lap.

"I grieve for those who have lost family members to his senseless acts of violence. Those kids were always getting in trouble, they were rotten from day one. I tried to teach them right from wrong-"

"Sir, if we can move on -" interrupted the interviewer, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes, suspecting that she was under orders to keep the man from mentioning the other blond, the one they were so eager to retrieve.

"The other one was worse. I tried with them, I tried -" continued Yuui's father, and then the interview lost sound suddenly. Yuui turned away, his shoulders shaking, but the subtitles at the bottom of the screen helpfully continued despite the absence of noise: _but their mother was always getting in the way. She wouldn't let me teach them proper discipline, she spoiled them rotten, the monsters. _

The image froze then, and cut back to the news anchor who looked apologetic and talked about technical difficulties. She looked smug, and Kurogane suspected the Martian channel had aired the clip deliberately. He hit the off switch and the screen faded to black.

"Your dad's a prick," said Kurogane, after a pause, and succeeded in startling a surprised bark of bitter laughter out of Yuui. But at least the tight, inward-pinched tension eased up a bit.

"You can say that again," he said. "We never got on. Fai hated him, he was always a bully."

"So, all this 'discipline' he tried to do," Kurogane asked. He wanted to get some measure of the circumstances Yuui had grown up in, but he couldn't think of a gentle way to ask.

"He didn't beat us," Yuui said slowly. "If that's what you're asking. Not often. He did it once or twice, but nothing more. Mostly he liked to shout at us or tell us how much he wished we weren't there. He gave me a black eye once when I was six, but our mother saw and she chewed him out for it. It really upset Fai, though, he used to say if he hit us again he'd sneak into our parents' room and kill him in his sleep. I don't think he was exaggerating, Fai _hated _him."

Kurogane raised his eyebrows, a little shocked at the thought of a child willing to do that to a parent - respect for his elders had been ingrained into him since he was old enough to talk. "Your brother sounds..."

"He looked out for me," Yuui said, immediately. "When nobody else would. He always looked out for me. Our parents weren't so good at that. When we're sick nobody comes, nobody ever comes..." He trailed off then, and Kurogane got the feeling that he wasn't the one Yuui was talking to just then. Yuui wore a strangely soft expression, one Kurogane had seen him wear a few times before, always when thinking about his brother.

"We were glad to leave that house, Captain Curious," Yuui said, his eyes suddenly bright and piercing on Kurogane's face. "There wasn't anything left there that we cared about."

* * *

><p>Yuui didn't remember much of the shuttle flight north. He remembered the hatchet-faced men in dark suits who came to collect them, the morning after Fai had decked their father hard enough he'd thrown up; he remembered the calm way they laid out their choices. The Eurasian Federation ran three military schools as an alternative to juvenile detention centers, and their father had arranged for the two of them to go to the one furthest from Hong Kong: Siberia's Onyx school. The serious-looking men in dark glasses had come to pick them up, and Yuui hadn't wanted to go, but he had hesitated and Fai had clapped him on the shoulder.<p>

"We might as well," he'd said. "It's not like it's any better down here. Come on."

And he'd grabbed their bag, the one that contained all their stuff, and Yuui had fallen into step behind him as they walked down the narrow staircase of their cramped apartment block one last time. Neither of them had looked back, not even when they climbed into the backseat of the bulletproof Federation car to begin their trip to the shuttle docking station. Fai was right. There was nothing left in Hong Kong that they could see.

They weren't the only people headed north, either. Several other kids, ranging in ages from eleven to their age, were hanging around the suborbital station waiting for the shuttle when they arrived. The hatchet-faced men took them to a desk sitting in the docking gate, manned by a tired-looking woman with messy blonde hair and dull green eyes, wearing a black suit with a Federation tie. They gave her their names, and she tapped them into a tiny computer, then frowned when the screen flashed red.

"How do you spell that," she said, and Fai leaned over her shoulder and entered them into the system for her. The screen just flashed red again; she tried a third time and then looked at them thoughtfully.

"Okay," she said, worrying at her lower lip with a lacquered thumbnail. "You're not in the system. What're your parents' names?"

The twins looked at each other, and Yuui shrugged minutely at Fai, who nodded. "We don't know," he said, and she lowered her hand from her mouth and gave them both long, searching looks.

"Great," she said with a sigh, and reached into a desk drawer, pulling out two black rectangular metal cases. She popped them open and slid them across the desk; they each contained a sharp needle. "Fine, we'll take a blood test, see if we can track your information that way. Put your thumb on the pad and keep it there until the light goes green."

Fai did as he was told quickly, Yuui copying him a heartbeat later. It didn't take long for the light to go green; the devices were obviously connected to the computer terminal by wireless, as a database quickly opened up. It wasn't the one she had been using; it was blue and was crowned by a strange-looking bird with a white head. The woman blinked at it in surprise.

"U.S justice department?" she said, sounding confused. "What on earth...?"

She flashed them both a probing look over the top of her glasses, and Yuui swallowed. Fai leaned over the desk to see the screen. "Huh," he said, and smiled pleasantly.

"I think you two should go sit down. I'll send someone to talk to you shortly," she told them, and Yuui felt a creeping sensation in the pit of his stomach. Something was definitely wrong.

"Why would our blood test lead her to a North American website?" he asked Fai as they took their seats, and Fai snorted, dumping their bag on the floor between them. The Fed woman had summoned another Fed woman to her desk, and the two of them were talking animatedly, peering at the screen their DNA test results had pulled up.

"Because _she_ was American, obviously," Fai said, and Yuui sat back in surprise, biting at his lower lip.

"How do you know that?" he asked in a low voice, and Fai paused, his face softening as he blinked. "She never said anything about that - she - she didn't even have an accent!"

"Yeah," Fai agreed, but he sounded less confident. The new Fed woman straightened up from the desk and touched the earpiece, turning to look at them and then back at the database as she spoke into it; she stopped, listened, and then nodded. Her shoes clicked across the floor as she came to them. "Listen, let me do the talking," Fai said in a low voice, and Yuui nodded.

"Fai, Yuui," said the new woman. "I'd like to ask you some new questions. Come this way, please."

Yuui glanced over at Fai, who had arranged his features in a pleasantly blank manner, and followed his twin as he climbed to his feet. The new Fed led them across the floor of the docking station to a small office, laser etching on the glass door identifying it as the station manager's office. It was empty, and she gestured them to seats in front of a rickety desk containing a rather battered workstation screen and piles of paper. An empty coffee mug sat atop a sticky brown ring, the words _best mom in China! _emblazoned across it proudly; she carefully took its handle between two fingers, tugged hard to unstick it from the desk, and moved it out of the way before she put down her own tablet and pulled up the plush leather chair.

"Are we in trouble?" Fai asked calmly, slouching in his seat, and she flicked her eyes up at him, then at Yuui, then back to him. Her brow furrowed and Yuui sighed, knowing what she was thinking, but for once she didn't comment on their matching faces and instead leaned across the desk to put her tablet in front of them. There was a photograph of a woman on its small screen, but Yuui didn't need to lean in closer to recognize her. He twitched, but Fai shot him a glance out of the corner of his eye and he subsided.

"Possibly," she said coolly. "Do you know that woman?"

Fai let his eyes rake over the picture for a long moment, and then gave a shallow nod; her mouth thinned. "Yeah," he said, neutrally.

"_How _do you know that woman," she said tightly.

"She's dead now," Fai said, as though he were talking about the weather. Yuui flinched again and her eyes flicked toward him; he swallowed. "She was our mother," Fai continued, in that same calm, bored voice.

"How long have you been living on Earth, Mr. Flowright?" she said, and now Fai lifted an eyebrow. The name was unfamiliar. "She was unmarried, that is your legal surname. How long?"

"All our lives," Fai said. "We're seventeen. Listen, she died when we were little kids, what has this got to do with us?"

She ignored them. "Five years ago we were alerted of her return to Earth by a Shenzhen hospital, who had retrieved her body from a low-rent apartment block by the old river. Apparently her death had been reported to the emergency services, but neither we nor the Americans could find a match for the voices of the caller who reported her death in our databases. It wasn't the registered tenant, so was it you?"

Fai scowled at her. "Maybe," he said, and she sighed, raising a hand and pinching her nose.

"I'm not interested in your teenage bravado, boy," she said. "I don't think you understand what kind of situation you're in. Your mother was a criminal and her escape from the Lunar colonies is what concerns us. Give me any more attitude and you could be facing charges as an accomplice."

Fai's face twisted as if he would like to call her bluff, but Yuui beat him to it. "She was a _criminal_?" Yuui blurted despite himself, and Fai turned and made a face at him. The Fed removed her hand from her face and eyed him thoughtfully, and he leaned back in his chair, swallowing.

"Three counts of manslaughter," she said, and scrolled back through the tablet. "Which one are you?"

"Yuui," he mumbled. "I don't - manslaughter? Who did she kill?"

"I don't know, the Americans didn't give us any details." The lady turned her scowl on the file frozen on the computer. "Tch, typical of them, they still think they matter. All I know is she's an American citizen, and after she killed those people they sent her up there instead of to the chair. What _we_want to know is, how did she get back?"

"How the hell would we know?" Fai snapped. "We were born here!"

She rubbed her hand over her mouth, and for a moment she looked tired. "So you say," she replied wearily. "And you're not in the system, so we can't prove that one way or another. What we want to know is, did she say anything at all? Anything?"

Yuui tensed quietly, her words ringing in his ears like a memory, Fai's voice distant and lazy and post-coital as he traced sweeping patterns over Yuui's skin: _she was sentenced to the Lunar colonies for something she didn't do, and she was scared, so she jumped back here_.

_The_ _whole universe, in her head. I think I see now._

"She never said anything about it to us," Fai said. "We didn't really talk much after we were eight or so. She wasn't the best mother out there."

"She wasn't bad," Yuui protested, and Fai leaned over toward him and shot him a glare that said, as clearly as words, _We are _not_ doing this now, Yuui._

"You always blame her," Yuui hissed back, and Fai rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to continue when the Fed coughed.

"Listen, boys," she said. "We're investigating a potential major security breach. I don't care about your domestic squabbles, I just want to know how she got out of the Lunar colonies, are we clear?"

"I don't understand, though," Yuui said quietly. "How could she get back here from the Lunar colonies? Aren't they guarded?"

Fai sighed heavily at the idiocy of his twin, but the lady only leaned back against her chair and folded her arms over her chest. "Yes," she said. "When the Americans came to us we thought it was a problem with their security, but they were able to prove to our satisfaction that the machines were working as they should. Which means that she found a way out that the Yankees don't know about. They don't regulate the criminals once they're up there, they didn't even know she was missing until we told them we'd found her body. So, think as hard as you can of anything she might have done, anyone she might have spoken to."

"The man who owned the apartment. He called himself our father," Fai offered, but she was shaking her head.

"He didn't meet her until later, we were able to track him that far. You would have been two years old by then. We went over his story five years ago when we found the body."

"'We would have been two when - " Yuui repeated, realizing what she was saying - that their father was not biologically their father - and Fai nudged him and shook his head. "You knew?"

"We'll talk about this later," Fai hissed, but Yuui couldn't stop staring, feeling betrayed. Fai should have told him. They didn't keep secrets, that wasn't how it _worked _between them. The Fed was still watching them, so he let it drop, but he couldn't stop the tightness in his belly, the antsy mix of anger and fear that made his hackles rise.

"There was her dealer," said Fai slowly, and she raised an eyebrow and tapped the tablet's touchscreen quickly with its stylus. "He might have known - something. I think he lived near a chemical processing plant - sometimes when she came home she smelled kind of, crisp, maybe?"

"Dealer in what kind of drug?" the Fed asked, and Fai paused, tilting his head back.

"Chrysameth, mostly, I think," he said. "It was her favorite."

"Coroner said she died of poisoning after mixing it with alcohol," she remarked, and Fai nodded.

"Yeah, like I said, her favorite. But if she couldn't afford that, anything else. We caught her sniffing cans of lighter fuel once."

"Just once," Yuui said, quickly. He didn't know why it bothered him to have their mother portrayed as some mindless addict, not when she had been sick and the drugs had been her coping mechanism and Fai _knew _that. "She never did it again!"

"She stopped doing it where we could _see_her," Fai argued, and Yuui glared at him. "Other than that she didn't have many contacts."

"How did she fund the drug habit? Did she have a job?"

Fai snorted. "Yeah," he said. "Oldest profession in the world - _ow_!"

"Stop lying," Yuui said tightly, lowering his elbow from where he had jabbed it into Fai's guts. He turned to the Fed and said, quickly, "She spent the food allowance. She wouldn't do _that_. Fai just doesn't like her, I - she was our _mother_."

"She starved you," Fai retorted coldly, and Yuui glared hotly at his twin. This was the crux of Fai's dislike of their mother. She'd starved both of them, but Fai only cared about him, and it got old.

"Okay, enough," said the Fed, sounding tired. "We're done here, for today at least. We'll send you off to the Siberian school, but if this dealer lead doesn't pan out, we'll be sending more officers to talk with you."

"Fantastic," Fai muttered, and she pushed her chair back, picking up her tablet and tucking it into the crook of her arm. Yuui glared at him as she held the door open for them and hailed a male Fed to take them direct to the shuttle, which had arrived while they'd been talking.

Neither of them said a word until they were safely ensconced in their seats at the very rear of the suborbital, Fai with the window seat and Yuui sitting by the aisle. One of their Fed escorts made his way down the middle of the vessel checking everyone was securely fastened in, and Yuui realized the shuttle had been waiting on them. He waited until the Fed sat down before nudging Fai harshly to get his attention.

"Why would you say all those things?" he whispered angrily, and Fai huffed out a breath.

"Because they were true enough," he hissed back. "She starved you, Yuui! She took the money that was supposed to be for food and she spent it on anything that would get her high!"

"You starved too," Yuui said, and Fai rolled his eyes.

"Do you really think that's going to make me look at her with more fondness or something?"

"She was _sick_," Yuui said quietly, and Fai's mouth thinned.

"Yeah, I know. The colors she saw. Great excuse, except I see them too , Yuui, and I'm not like her! Okay? It's... I don't understand why you can't just let her go. You don't need to defend her - "

"Yes I do," Yuui snapped. "You spend all your time making her out to be - wait." He paused. "You're still seeing colors?"

"Oh _gods_," Fai groaned, leaning back in his seat, and Yuui turned as much as the safety harness would let him to face his twin. The seething feeling in his stomach had morphed to a tighter, more dangerous one, one that only Fai could make him feel.

"You said that had stopped," he said in a low, angry voice. "You said you were fine, Fai."

Fai opened one eye to face him and sighed, deeply. "Yes, Yuui. I lied. Sorry, but - "

"Don't just tell me you're sorry," Yuui growled, and Fai looked at him in surprise. "Don't just - Fai, haven't you learned by now? When we're sick nobody comes, okay? Nobody _ever _comes, it's just us, and you can't keep lying to me. Did you ever really stop seeing them?"

Fai hesitated for a good long moment before answering, and when he did it was after the shuttle engines had started, the heavy whining drone almost sufficient to drown out his very quiet, "no."

Yuui closed his eyes and let his head tilt back until his neck thumped against the head rest. "You lied to me," he said. "You didn't tell me about - about dad. Are you even my Fai?"

"Of course I am," Fai said immediately, affronted. "I'm just trying to protect you, I -"

"I know you are! I know," Yuui said softly, tilting his head to look at his twin again. Fai looked distinctly concerned, and Yuui reached out and rested his arm on the armrest between their seats, palm up. "I do, but Fai... you can't lock me out. That's not how this works."

"You're all I have," Fai told him quietly, as the shuttle began to jolt around them. They'd never flown before, but Yuui found he didn't care about the movement or the view outside; he kept his eyes on his twin's face as Fai reached out and took his hand. "I don't like making you worry."

"I'm not a child anymore," Yuui said. "_We're _not children any more. We're going away, Fai, and things will be so different there and -" he broke off, turned away.

"Yuui," Fai murmured, sounding somewhat helpless. "Yuui, don't do that. I - I don't like it when you -"

"Just promise me if things get bad, you'll go to a doctor at the school," Yuui said. "Since you won't tell me when you're sick. I don't - I don't want you to die like she did, Fai, I can't - just don't."

"I promise I'll tell you -"

"No. I've heard that before," Yuui interrupted, and slouched in his seat. "You're all I have too, Fai. Don't lie to me again."

"I'm sorry," Fai whispered, but Yuui didn't answer. He had nothing new to say anyway.

The intercom bleeped then, and Fai tightened his grip on Yuui's hand as the last few members of crew buckled themselves in. Yuui swallowed, closing his eyes, and the entire shuttle began to vibrate as it went through the launch process; the force generated shoved them rudely back in their seats, but neither of them let go, and it passed soon enough as the shuttle gained momentum.

Yuui swallowed nervously and didn't look out the window. It was the first time he'd left the ground, and he didn't think he liked it; but he risked a glance at Fai, and the marvel and wonder he saw on his twin's face as Fai peered intently out of the tiny window at the Earth spread grey and smoky and blue under them, the curvature of her globe clearly visible under them, made him look younger than he really was.

Yuui knew then that he wasn't mad with his twin. He never could be, and he squeezed Fai's hand gently in his; Fai turned to him in surprise, and with a boldness rare for him, born of being in the very back seat, Yuui leaned over and kissed him softly, their dry lips chapped and warm. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

"Yuui!" Fai whispered, his blue eyes wide and bright, and Yuui tried to copy Fai's confident smile, the one that made him seem so very invulnerable.

"We might not get to do that for a while," he whispered back, and Fai smiled at him crooked and sweet, and Yuui took advantage of their isolation yet again.

Hong Kong was behind them now. But home - home was wherever they were together.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	12. 10: a new age warrior

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise - Chapter 10  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Fai/Yuui, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Although we are both working on all parts of the story, chapter nine was mostly written by Reikah and chapter ten was mostly written by me._

* * *

><p>The three days until the meeting stretched out interminably; after the incident with Martian security, Yuui was far too spooked to want to go on any more shopping adventures. So it was just the four of them, once again stuffed into the too-cramped ship with only each other for company; and Kurogane, at least, was company only a masochist would enjoy.<p>

The big man's temper was short at the best of times, but the closer they drew to the meeting with the Triads the worse his demeanor became. His normally curt responses - which Yuui had come to recognize were just his brusque, no-nonsense approach to communications - grew to contain a savage bite, and he became increasingly more irritable and aggressive to even the most minor offenses.

By the last day he was spending most of his time in the rec room, practicing a savage routine of _kendo_ and martial arts. Neither of the kids dared to approach - even if Kurogane left for a while, he was surely to come storming back in shortly and roar at them to get out and give him some god damned peace and quiet to practice. Only Yuui was able to stick out his presence

Yuui stayed partly because, he realized with a certain guilty conscience, it was his own need for pharmaceuticals that had let to this deal that was driving Kurogane to distraction. The kids had said it outright; Kurogane never dealt with drugs, and thus, never with the Triads. But more than that - he realized as he exchanged joking, witty banter for snarled insults - he was coming to find that even at his most irascible, Kurogane didn't scare him.

So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that on the day of the meeting, Kurogane abruptly ordered Yuui into the shuttle to accompany him down to Mars.

"Why me?" Yuui asked as he followed Kurogane obediently to the hatch - another tunnel leading "up" away from the ship's core towards the vacuum outside. "The kids are both from Mars, they know it better."

Kurogane grumbled irritation as he buckled himself into the pilot's harness, running through a mysterious array of pre-flight checks. "They're good kids, but they're both entirely too honest," was his flat reply. "If I'm going to bring another body to this meeting, it might as well be someone who could pull his weight in a fight if things go south."

"Do you expect them to go south?" Yuui asked, inwardly almost dancing with excitement that Kurogane thought he was a worthy partner in the fight. "If it's too dangerous for the children, then isn't unfair to drag me into it, isn't it?"

Kurogane shot him a flat, fulminating glare from around the captain's chair, before he turned back to the shuttle's touchscreen. "Don't be an idiot," he said. "You're just as dangerous as they are."

Quietly, Yuui swung his way forward into the copilot's chair, settling himself into it with a grace that his pre-kinesis training self would have marveled at. "But they don't know that, do they?" he said. "I mean, it's not something you can tell just by looking."

"Of course they know," Kurogane grunted as he unlatched a row of safety seals from the docking clamp controls. "Martian Planetary Security knows all about you, so they do too. But even if the MPS didn't rely on the Triads to launder most of their under-the-table affairs, don't think they'd let the arrival of a kinetic as powerful as you run around unnoticed. Way too big a risk."

"Oh," Yuui said, still not used to thinking of himself as a risk. "Will they - will I be in danger from them?" he asked with a wary edge in his voice.

"Course not," Kurogane snorted. "They'll probably try to recruit you, though. Don't commit to anything. An outright refusal would be a deadly insult - that's _your_ death, just to clarify - but anything that sounds like it might give them an opening they'll pounce on like a starving hyena and hound you for fucking ever about it."

"That doesn't leave many options," Yuui observed after a moment. "If you can't say no, and can't say yes."

"I never said they were fair," Kurogane said, with a smile that was barely more than a flash of bared teeth. "Strap in. We're going for the drop."

The shuttle screamed towards the planet's surface like a furious tiger, and Yuui's hands clutched around the arms of the copilot's chairs and reminded himself - again - that this was all routine for space travel. But that was remarkably little comfort when hurtling towards a planet's surface in a metal box with the aerodynamics of a brick.

Eventually they began to level out, and Yuui watched the Martian surface flying by with more interest. They were headed well away from the city this time, out into the barely-terraformed backlands along the Martian equator. The terrain was harsh and unforgiving, and totally inhospitable to roads; for this town, as with many others, they only way in or out was by air or by foot.

The low-slanting angle of the sun threw the uneven ground into vivid relief, and Yuui started fascinated at a landscape unlike any he'd ever seen in inner-city Hong Kong. Even the undeveloped lands of planet Earth had been known, charted, and tamed for centuries now; but the virgin lands of Mars were truly wild and unknown, uninhabited and untrodden by the foot of any man.

They passed by towering cliffsides with ruler-straight strata fragmented into right-angle patterns as complex as a circuit board, and flew over plunging ravines that vanished into unfathomable blackness, legacy of violent floodwaters millions of years gone. Rocks had been broken from their native beds and carried away for miles before being deposited on soft beds of red clay; some of them were twisted and eroded into shapes so complex and breathtakingly detailed that it was hard to believe they weren't man-made sculptures. Here and there they overflew stands of trees, grim and gray in their decades-long struggle to find a foothold in the barren soil and cold, dry winds - yet inch by inch, they spread their roots and branches and conquered the planet.

A blip on their radar signaled the town coming up long before they saw it, and Yuui was surprised to realize that there was no dome. The landmark for which the town had been named - Needle Rock - loomed up tall and red and sharp against the sunset, with a peculiar and perfectly smooth hole worn through the exact center of the peak. The town itself was only a few acres, low square blocks of native stone, plastic, and concrete. They made a bizarre ornament to the wild, rugged contours of the land, and Yuui was once again struck with a sense of disorientation.

The place he had grown up was as far from nature as you could possibly get; the closest to trees and rocks he ever came as a child was playing in the park with his twin. The Earth had been thoroughly beaten into submission, harnessed into service and coaxed into displaying its fruits and beauties according to human aesthetics. But this wild land defied such taming, and for all their alien nature, the buildings and the town seemed appropriate for the setting - as tough and rugged and enduring as the stones themselves.

It couldn't be said that the rural Martians lived in _harmony _with the land - it was more of a wary _détente_. There wasn't much room for fanciful illusions about the balance of nature and the beauty of the planet when the ecology - not to mention the world itself - was doing its level best to wipe you clean off its face. And yet the buildings an the layout of the town shouted of determination, a rough pride in all that they had accomplished. Look, they seemed to say, here we are; these are the things that matter to us, and here we'll stay.

Yuui could definitely see how Syaoran could have come from a place like this one.

His surprise edged into dismay, however, as Kurogane set the shuttle down on the flat expanse of bedrock that served this town for a landing pad (several other shuttles, hovercars, and light aircraft were crammed into a corner by the cliff.) "There's no dome," he said.

"This place is barely big enough to qualify for its own outhouse, let alone its own dome," Kurogane replied, switching the shuttle into standby mode and activating the security systems.

"But - the roads between the houses aren't covered," Yuui said. "How do they get from one house to another?"

"Simple," Kurogane said. He unstrapped himself from the pilot's chair and stood, reached into a dark corner, and pulled out a huge heavy wool coat which he tossed at Yuui. "Here, put this on," he said. "You'll find gloves in the pockets, and scarves - as well as outer boots - are in the locker behind you. Oh, and your breath mask."

"They go _out_ in the Martian atmosphere?" Yuui said incredulously.

"Sure do," Kurogane said. "Terraforming's been going for over a hundred years by now. Atmospheric pressure isn't much worse here than you'd find at Earth in the highest mountain ranges - although most of it's carbon dioxide, at least so far. Once the trees get fully established and cover half the planet, humans will be able to breathe on Mars without assistance. But it doesn't have a patch on vacuum - it's cold and dry, so it'll be hell on your skin, but it won't kill you."

With some trepidation, Yuui drew on the heavy coat - he realized instantly that it must have been Kurogane's, since it was not only long enough for him but actually too big and loose around the shoulder and chest. He inhaled deeply, catching a musky scent that must have been Kurogane's, and a bolt of electricity seemed to shoot from his nose down his spine. He quickly bent down under the cover of pulling on the boots to hide the blush. His arms disappeared into the sleeves, but at least he wouldn't be cold; he was sweating just standing in the warm shuttle.

He watched Kurogane carefully as the bigger man pulled on his breathing mask and imitated his actions, adjusting the straps to fit it closely to his face and pulling the hood up around the edges of the mask. Thin plastic disks covered his eyes, but they didn't obscure his vision any more than the edge of the hood did anyway. The small, lightweight air canisters hung from his shoulders over his chest, and the coat fastened over everything.

When they were finished, the two of them stood in the shuttle's hatchway almost like strangers; if not for Kurogane's distinctive height and breadth, Yuui wasn't sure he would be able to recognize him at all.

"Let's go," Kurogane said brusquely, his voice slightly muffled by the breath mask. Then he punched open the shuttle hatch to the airlock, and the two of them cycled through.

The wind roared past them as the outer hatch opened, but not with the hurricane gale of a vacuum, and Yuui realized that Kurogane was right; the air pressure wasn't that much less than on Earth. He stumbled slightly as he dropped onto the ground below before he managed to steady his balance. The surface was loose, crunchy gravel, and Yuui felt a moment of obscure disappointment that his first moment standing on Martian soil was not more glorious. The sky above was clear of clouds and it was still hours until sunset, but even so the light seemed strangely dim to Yuui, like a winter's day compared to the same sun on Earth.

As they crunched across the gravel stand towards the town, Yuui felt the wind tug harshly at the sleeves of his heavy coat. He could feel the chill even through the layers, and the light glinted on tiny particles of dust and ice driven by the wind. But there were no exposed areas of skin for them to claw at, and his breathing remained harsh but steady behind the mask.

Three men were standing on the side of the airfield, waiting for them. They too were attired in heavy hooded coats and breath masks, but Yuui caught a flash of red encircling the upper arms of each of them; a cloth armband printed with a pattern of three interlocking triangles.

"That's the Triads' symbol," Kurogane muttered before they came into hearing range. "In the cities flaunting that armband would get you arrested on the spot; but out here, it's more than your life's worth mess with someone wearing that symbol."

The leader of the three men raised his hand as they approached, with a glinting electronic device encased in clear plastic to protect it from the grinding dust. Kurogane pulled something from his pocket that flashed in return - an exchange of encryption keys, Yuui guessed. Redundant, since they had to have gotten their ID's off the Mokona's shuttle before they could have even landed, but Yuui supposed it made sense for them to be careful who they dealt with.

The men - guards, Yuui supposed - fell into formation around them as they turned towards the town. Once off the wide, flat airstrip, windbreaks of stone and trees began to reduce the chilling effect of the wind. The road was made of tough plastic topping a solid concrete foundation, but off to the side bare ground was occasionally broken up by dun-colored grass. Yuui spotted other figures walking to and from the buildings, all dressed in the same dark brown or grey coats and heavy boots and with their faces hidden.

"Is everyone in this town part of the mob?" Yuui muttered to his companion.

"Who, them?" Kurogane surprised Yuui with a chuckle. "Nah, they're just the townspeople. The Triads own Needle Rock pretty much outright - own most of the land and the production - but that doesn't mean all the people are members. They're just getting along, doing what they have to survive; most of them work on the farms."

"Farms?" Yuui looked around. "I haven't seen any."

"You have, you just don't realize it - they're all indoors." Kurogane's masked face nodded towards a row of very long, low buildings set in the distance. The roof was capped with clear plastic, Yuui realized, although from this angle they couldn't see what was inside. "Everything on Mars is indoors, one way or another."

"What can they possibly grow here, though?" Yuui wondered.

"Oh, you'd be surprised," Kurogane said. "Martian cultivation technology is the best in the solar system - has to be, instead of on Earth where it's cheapest to just grow everything outside and let the sun do the work. But a lot of delicate plants do surprisingly well in the lower gravity and higher CO2 concentration of Mars, so if they put their mind to it, they can grow just about any plant you'd find on Earth - and a few more.

"Mostly what they grow is drugs, though," Kurogane added as an afterthought, and Yuui almost choked.

"Drugs?"

"Lots of these little Martian towns do. They _can_ grow food crops and cotton and what have you, but the profit margin on drugs is much higher - after the Triads take their cut, it's the only way they can make enough money to survive. But like I said, they own Needle Rock pretty much outright, so it's one of their biggest production bases. All of the cargo we'll be taking to Europa was grown and processed here."

Yuui started to ask another question, but Kurogane cut him off with a growl. "We're here," he said.

They had reached the tallest building in the town - not the biggest by a long shot, but the most stories - and there were two more heavily bundled guards sporting red armbands by the door. They were mostly for show, Yuui guessed, and as his eyes flicked upwards he caught glimpses of the flat panels and slightly recessed weapon ports that provided the real security for this place.

The guards with them held up their electronic identifier again, and the door slid open. The group moved quickly inside and Yuui, the last one through the door, hesitated for a moment on the lintel as he felt the blast of an air curtain on his face. A hard hand grabbed his elbow and yanked him forward, allowing the door to seal behind him. "Never stand in an open doorway," Kurogane muttered, keeping hold of Yuui's arm as they moved through a second set of doors into a warm, well-lit interior. "It's the rudest thing you can do here - lets the air and heat out."

"Oh." Kurogane still hadn't taken his hand off Yuui's arm, and Yuui wondered if he ought to say something. Maybe Kurogane was keeping tabs of him like a parent would an errant child, to stop him from wandering off and causing trouble - or then again, maybe Kurogane wanted everyone watching to know without a doubt that Yuui was here with him.

Once inside, it was hard for Yuui to believe that they were still in the same rustic Martian village he had seen outside - the interior of the building was hardly different from any office he'd seen on Earth, aside from the complete lack of exterior windows. Desks and carpets, discreet _shoji_ screens, the occasional potted plant - it was about as far from the cavernous hideaway where villainous pirates counted their ill-gotten loot as Yuui could imagine. Yet the money was still here. The expensive feel of the carpets underfoot, the imported wood paneling on the desks, and the tasteful, muted aesthetic of the decorating all screamed 'expensive!'

Yuui began to feel more out of place than ever.

A pretty girl in a grey business suit appeared before them, smiling at Kurogane. "Welcome," she said with a polite bow. "Mistress Amamiya is ready for your appointment - she said not to keep you waiting."

She ushered them over towards the elevator, but then Kurogane's hand on Yuui's elbow dragged him to a halt. "Right," he said. "I don't want you sitting in for this."

"What?" Yuui looked over at Kurogane, bewildered and a bit hurt. "But I thought you brought me along to - watch your back." He stumbled over the last words, suddenly aware that it might be less than polite to say so in front of their hosts.

"Yeah," Kurogane said, his eyes flickering around the push office lobby and narrowing. "And I've done that - let everyone watching know that I'm not fucking around, and that I've brought enough firepower to back myself up. But this is business now, and none of yours."

"Wait a minute!" Yuui said, as Kurogane released him with a little push and turned towards the elevator. He lowered his voice to a hiss, not wanting to get into a very public and spectacular fight with his - partner? Employee? Associate? What exactly did their strange relationship make them. "You brought me all this way and now you're saying you don't _trust me _enough to have me in the room?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Kurogane said, his own expression hardening. "There's trust and there's trust, kid. I trust you to watch my back in a fight, but let's face it, you don't know anything about this kind of business deal. So make yourself scarce for an hour or so. No one who works here will bother you unless something's gone very wrong."

"And what if something does?" Yuui challenged him. "If something goes 'very wrong' and I'm not there to help you?"

"Then get back to the shuttle if you can," Kurogane replied flatly. "And good luck."

Yuui felt his face getting hot, and at the same time he was suddenly intensely aware of the presence of others - the pretty secretary, the half-seen figures behind the screens, others invisible behind the walls but listening intently through monitoring equipment. He didn't really want to have all of them listening in on this spat, but he promised himself that he _would _take this up with Kurogane later.

He turned on his heel and marched for the door, the back of his neck burning, and heard the hiss of the elevator doors behind him. Somehow, the pristine office seemed an even less appealing place to wait than the cold Martian tundra.

Once outside, he paused to look around, shivering a bit disconsolately in the cold gritty wind. The two guards at the door were looking at him - it was impossible to read expressions through the breath masks, but he thought their attitude was rather coldly intimidating. Obviously they wouldn't take kindly to him hanging around outside their mob boss's office for the next hour, so he crunched off over the gravel the way he'd come.

Without having any real idea of where to go, Yuui headed back towards the shuttlepad from where they'd come, with a vague idea of waiting out the hour in the warmth of the ship's interior. He stopped, though, when he saw another shuttle sitting beside the Mokona's - one whose wings were branded with the logo of a snarling tiger.

Even growing up in a poor neighborhood on Earth, Yuui still recognized the trademark symbol of the Kajitori. It was a word that had become synonymous with space travel - like other household names, like Ford or Disney or Dobratz (who had achieved an early lockout on methods of prepping and storing edible food for space environments,) it was hard to remember that 'Kajitori' had once been the name of a real person. Or a family of people, rather - the Kajitori had been one of the _zaibatsu,_ the Japanese mega-corporations who built the grand space stations hanging in the sky over Earth.

Apart from the generalities, though, Yuui was only vaguely aware of what exactly the Kajitori did - up until they'd been 'recruited' by the psi academy, neither he nor his twin had ever dreamed of traveling off-planet. He knew of them only as much as everyone growing up in the modern world knew on them, and perhaps it wasn't as much of a shock as it should have been to find them working hand-in-glove with the Triads. Despite the legacy of enmity between the Chinese and Japanese that stretched back hundreds of years, business was, after all, business.

Still - if outsiders came to this town regularly, then mob-owned or not, there had to be _some_ sort of inn or restaurant that catered to outsiders. Yuui reversed his steps, beginning to shiver even inside the heavy stifling coat, and headed for the largest and busiest-looking street in the town.

Although he saw several other people on the streets - of various sizes and builds, some walking alone, some in small pairs or groups - all avoided and ignored him when he tried to approach them. Eventually he homed in on his destination by following the strains of music and voices that drifted from the doorway of a large, well-fronted building on the street, and was rewarded with a small, discreet plaque over the door that said _Drinks_ in three different languages.

This time, he remembered to move quickly through the doorway and let it close behind him. It was unquestionably a bar; the smell of booze and tobacco,\ p as well as the faint sweet trace of other substances - filled the air, and tables dotted an open space before a bar manned by a humorless-looking local. The air inside was much hotter than the office building had been, and he peeled back his hood and lowered the breath mask almost immediately, shaking his sweat-dampened hair out with relief.

A whistle pierced the hot, smoky air of the bar, but Yuui didn't immediately associate it with himself as he shrugged out of the heavy coat and hung it from a peg on the wall. As he walked towards the bar, however, a hand shot out from one of the tables and grabbed his wrist. "Hey, baby!" the would-be grabber shouted, his voice with the slightly off-key cadence of the drunk. "You're so fine, I'd like to use your thighs as earmuffs!"

For a moment Yuui staggered, caught off balance; then training kicked in, and he twisted his wrist against the grip to free it and fell backwards into a self-defense stance. The group of men at the table in front of him just laughed uproariously, as though his resistance was part of some cosmic joke.

Yuui ran his eyes over the group of drunks, taking in their flashy, outlandish clothes - they didn't look or act anything like the other locals. "You guys are with the Kajitori?" he said with some surprise. The Kajitori ship had arrived after theirs did, which meant these men had been here for less than an hour, and they were already shit-faced?

"That's right, sweetface!" the man who had grabbed Yuui's arm said boisterously. "And you know what that means, right? We're rich!"

"Rich as thieves," one of the other men said, toasting an oversized shotglass which clinked with ice. "Which I suppose technically is what we are. Without going into the details, ten percent of a fuckton of money is still a shitload of money."

"Come and have a drink with us, honey," the grabby man said again, pawing his arm towards Yuui's waist. "Or better yet, a lot of drinks, and then an hour in the upstairs room. How about it, sexy? I promise I'll buy you all the diamond earrings you like afterwards!"

Yuui dodged the arm, his annoyance growing. "I'm not a woman," he corrected them icily.

"Oh, baby, I don't hold that against you," the drunkard said, which produced a roar of laughter from his friends. "No, seriously… you're almost perfect, baby."

"Almost?" Yuui asked before he could help himself.

"Yeah, _almost,_" the guy said with a slightly off-center leer. "We've been talking for five minutes, and you're not naked yet!"

Yuui rolled his eyes and turned his back, heading for the bar. Good gods, how stupid did you have to be to actually try a line like that in public? As if this drunken idiot could hold a candle when it came to - Kurogane, for example. Yuui felt a moment of renewed appreciation for Kurogane's ability to accept 'no' for an answer.

"Hey!" the drunk shouted from behind him. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Somewhere cleaner," Yuui shot back over his shoulder, and took a seat at the bar. He eyed the row of bottles behind the bartender, wondering if he'd be obliged to pay for a drink in order to be allowed to stay here and if so, what he could order that wouldn't likely make him sick.

"Don't turn your back on me, you stupid bitch! I'm Kajitori Yosho, and nobody turns their back on me!" the man yelled, his voice losing the humor and turning ugly. There was a scraping sound of a chair being pushed back, and Yuui tensed, stilling as he centered himself for a fight.

The next one to speak was the bartender, in harsh, rapid Cantonese. It took a moment for his peculiar accent to filter through Yuui's ears; something about "rules" and "not to bother" and a slang term he'd heard referring to the streetwalkers in his old Hong Kong neighborhood.

"_He's not one of yours_," the drunk said sullenly, his own dialect slightly more comprehensible. "_What do you care about some _gwaipor?"

Yuui considered pointing out to the parties involved that he could speak Chinese, but somehow it didn't seem worth the effort.

"_Rules are rules,_" the bartender said flatly. "_Settle down or get out." _

The drunken Kajitori returned slowly to his chair, and a sullen silence over the bar was slowly broken by rising voices and the shuffle of glasses again. Yuui gave a bright, plastic smile to the barman, who nodded expressionlessly at him and asked "What'll you have?"

* * *

><p>Kurogane stormed out of the artificially elegant building into the cold Martian air, yanking his hood up over his head as the blast of the air curtain rolled over him. <em>Stupid bitch,<em> he thought seethingly. _Just can't pick up on a hint, or take 'no' for an answer. _

He was glad now that he'd sent Yuui away for this meeting - Sonomi had insisted on addressing him by his family name for the entire interview, and he'd eventually given up on the point in order to better dig in his heels over other things. No, he was not going to sign a contract for further drug runs. No, he was not going to accept any 'complimentary loans' of ships or troops to escort him. No, he would not do any spying on the chaotic governments of the Jovian sphere once he was out there and report it back to the Triads via a secure link. And no, no matter what she offered, he was not going to persuade his 'esper friends' to seek protection from Earth depredations with the Triads. As if their 'protection' was anything less than a life of indentured servitude, however prettily they dressed it up!

Walking in the cold Martian wind soon cooled his boiling temper to a low simmer, and he began to look around for his companion. A small twinge of guilty conscience assaulted him; he supposed it hadn't been very tactful of him to throw him out of the meeting with Sonomi without even telling him where he could safely wait. There weren't really many places in this town for outsiders to go, and he tried the local bar first. The sun was beginning to dip towards the horizon, and ice was beginning to precipitate into a thin layer of frost under his boots as he headed in that direction.

He was in luck - he spotted the blond head sitting over by the bar as soon as he came in. He glanced over the rest of the crowd, assessed the crowd of unruly drunks as 'not a threat' and dismissed them from his attention, heading straight over to the bar. Yuui looked up as he approached, and his first expression of pleased welcome made Kurogane's chest warm. It was quickly quenched by remembered annoyance, and those blue eyes narrowed dangerously before the man snorted eloquently and turned back to his drink. "Finished your meeting?" he said icily.

Well, he supposed he deserved that. Kurogane slid onto the bar stool next to Yuui and called the bartender over. "I'll have two double whiskeys, and keep them coming," he growled. Mars whiskey wasn't as good as Earth whiskey - there was always a distinctive harsh aftertaste - but at least they made the booze in this place strong enough to kill a cow.

The drinks were slapped in front of him with gratifying speed, and Kurogane took great pleasure in paying for it with the Triads' own money. He took a large gulp, closing his eyes tightly for a moment while he fought the burn, then set the emptied glass down with a harsh exhale.

Yuui had turned to watch him. "Didn't go well?" he offered dryly after a moment.

"About as expected," Kurogane growled. At least the worst was over, and he could concentrate on getting drunk as quickly as possible. Thank God for autopilot controls, which meant he could feel free to get as smashed as necessary and still be back in the Mokona by tonight.

He picked up the second whiskey, and this one at least lasted more than two swigs. "Don't worry about it, though," he said after a minute. "It's set. They're loading up the cargo into the shuttle within the hour. Your brother will get what he needs."

Yuui wilted slightly on the bar stool, and the rest of his annoyance at being excluded from the negotiations dissolved. "Thanks," he murmured. When he looked up, his blue eyes were huge and full of a sincere gratitude. _Holy shit,_ Kurogane thought, and went back to his drink in self defense. "Sorry... about all this. I know you didn't want to have to do it."

"I don't do anything I don't want to," Kurogane corrected him, staring into his glass as a safer alternative to those wide blue eyes. "Being an independent ship's captain means you can't always avoid the hard jobs, that's all."

They drank in companionable silence for a while, and Kurogane gradually began to unwind. It had been a long time, he realized, since he'd been able to relax in the company of another man - not just with the kids, whom he liked and trusted but who ultimately depended on him for guidance and protection, but with an equal. For a change, he actually felt comfortable enough in someone else's presence to vent some his frustrations.

"There's just no safe way of dealing with these people," he said. The bartender was still within hearing range, but he wasn't worried; the man was a local townsmen, which meant he dealt with the Triads, but he didn't have to like them and he didn't spy for them. "You give them an inch, they take a fucking mile. They'll fall all over themselves to offer you a sweet deal, but as soon as you take it, you'll find the fucking wolves at your door waiting to collect a thousand percent."

"Sounds like the only way to win is not to play," Yuui remarked, tilting his own glass - Kurogane noticed he'd been working on the same one he'd had when Kurogane had come in, while he'd polished off three himself in the same time.

"Yeah, exactly," Kurogane agreed. "And the most infuriating thing was that they kept trying to get at you guys through me, because you're espers and the fucking Martians think they should have a lock on all things telepathic -"

"Us?" Yuui looked up quickly, and it took a moment for Kurogane to process what had alarmed him so.

"You and the girl," he amended quickly. "I never said a thing about your guest, and they don't seem to have heard of him through any other channels either."

Yuui relaxed again. "Thanks," he muttered.

"They're not Earth," Kurogane felt the need to say. "They don't abuse their own people, and it's a damn sight sure they'd be able to protect you from Earth more thoroughly than one ship's captain and a crew of kids."

Yuui met his eyes again, and smiled - and it was funny how Kurogane had come to tell the difference between his fake plastic smiles and the rare, real ones. "I'll take my chances," he said.

They drank in silence for a few more minutes. "But they must hold you in pretty high regard, in order to offer you this job at all," Yuui said. "If they're not as bad as all that, then why are you so opposed to doing business with them?"

Kurogane grimaced, the warm fuzzies melting away as his bad mood returned. He downed another shot of whiskey, feeling the buzz finally beginning in his head and hands. "Don't get the wrong idea," he growled. "They play nice and put on an honorable front when they can, but underneath they're still a bunch of thugs and criminals. They run a dirty business that ruins millions of people's lives, and they don't care who else they do business with who isn't as nice and honorable as they are."

He thought back to the last argument he'd had with Sonomi, and had to put the glass down again before he crushed it in the grip of his involuntary rage. "I told her I'll never sign any contracts with the Triads while they still do business with scum like the Kajitori," he spat.

To his surprise, Yuui barked a laugh, and took another drink of his own whiskey. "If they're anything like that lot of drunken idiots, I don't blame you there," he said.

"What?" Kurogane squinted at him, frowning.

"That lot over there," Yuui said, nodding over his shoulder at the group of drunks Kurogane had dismissed earlier. "They're Kajitori - I saw their ship outside. They were making themselves obnoxious earlier on, bragging about how much money they made doing an equipment run for the Triads…"

Yuui kept prattling on, saying something about cheesy pickup lines and idiot drunks, but Kurogane wasn't listening. His vision had narrowed to a tunnel of dark red, all the rage he'd been struggling with for the past few days igniting to a flashpoint.

It wasn't the fault of these men. He knew that objectively. But that didn't stop the fury that roared up in him like a dragon, breathing clouds of smoke and flame that dimmed his vision and drove him out of his chair. He walked towards the men gathered around the table, drinking and laughing - _laughing,_ as though they had the right…

"Captain Tipsy? What are you doing?" Yuui's voice came from behind him, but Kurogane barely heard it. He came to the edge of the group and hesitated, restraining his muscles from lashing out with a great effort. Four of them, Kurogane made note; two staggeringly drunk, two relatively sober. Only one with the presence of mind to keep his weapon nearby.

Gradually the talk and laughter died down as the Kajitori became aware of his presence. The drunkest one, who had his back towards the bar and Kurogane, twisted around and squinted up at him. "Oi! You got a problem?" he said belligerently. "Don't stick your ugly mug in here when we're busy drinking!"

"You've got an awful lot of money to throw around for a bunch of worthless low-lifes," Kurogane said, and the other conversations in the bar came to an abrupt halt. He hadn't raised his voice at all, but there was a dangerous edge to it, a humming undercurrent like a live cable just waiting for someone foolish enough to put his hand on it.

"Yeah, so what?" the drunkard sneered. His eyes traveled up - and up - Kurogane's frame, and he couldn't suppress a gloating smirk at how easily he loomed over the smaller man. "Freak."

Kurogane leaned forward, getting into the guy's face, and the man turned slightly paler as he leaned back to try to get away. "So I wonder where you got so much blood money," Kurogane snarled. "Who'd you have to kill to get so rich? That's all you Kajitori bastards know how to do."

"What of it?" one of the other Kajitori said, his tone edged to match Kurogane's own. He stepped forward, hand on the katana at his waist, and Kurogane watched that hand hungrily. Yes, oh yes, be the one to draw first - "Who are you, the space cops? 'Cos if so, you picked the wrong bar to show up in. Or are you one of those dickless Mino bas -"

Kurogane's hand was still on the table's edge. On any self-respecting spaceship - or even a station - what he was about to do wasn't possible, because all furniture was bolted down in potentially free-fall environments. But this was Mars, and they didn't care about such things, and so the table was only a lump of metal and plastic free-standing on the floor. The table itself weighed over a hundred kilos, and the Kajitori went scrambling back with curses and yells as Kurogane heaved up the edge and flipped the table. Plates and glasses slid everywhere and shattered, bottles of gin and vodka crashing onto the floor and spraying everyone with their contents.

Before the glass had finished shattering Kurogane jumped up onto the table's underside, falling into a stance on the rocky footing. The Kajitori fell back, looks of shock and outrage on their expression. "What the fuck are you doing, you crazy bastard?" one of them cried. "You've got no idea who you're messing with! Kajitori Shouji is my uncle - one word from me about you, and you'll never ride a space lane again!"

"Only if you live long enough to go crying to him, you spineless cockroach," Kurogane snarled, and drew his sword from its scabbard with a long, sinuous scrape of steel. "I'm not a cop, and I'm not Mino. I'm the Black Dragon of Suwa, and if you want to live, you'd better fight; if you try to run, I'll cut you down like the dogs you are!"

He watched their faces, the dark part of him glorying in their expressions as the meaning sunk in; first puzzlement, then shock, then fear. Two of them - the stupid ones, Kurogane marked them - sputtered in disbelief. "But that's not possible," the nephew-Kajitori said. "The Black Dragon - but he was -"

The other two, either less drunk or more quick on the uptake, didn't bother with words; they both drew their swords in reply, and charged at him with fierce cries.

"Captain!" he heard Yuui cry, and saw the blond man start towards him. "Please stop - you don't need to do this!"

Kurogane suppressed a surge of irrational fury that anyone else would dare to interfere - no, Yuui probably just thought he was trying to help. Or had Yuui gotten the idea that Kurogane was somehow defending his honor? What an idiot. "Stay out of this!" Kurogane roared back at him, keeping his eyes on the enemy. "This is none of your business!"

All of the children of the _zaibatsu_ trained in the use of swords - Mino, Kajitori, and Suwa. It was a tradition as old as the space stations themselves. When their ancestors had built the first solar habitats, they quickly became aware of the terrible vulnerability of their floating cities to the vacuum outside. Their life-support systems balanced on a thread between fire and ice; an explosion or a gunshot in the wrong place could kill hundreds. As a precaution against disaster, they banned firearms and explosives of any kind on the station, and kept a strict monitor on the chemicals or facilities that could be used to manufacture them. Not even the police and security officers were permitted to carry guns, because a single misplaced shot could doom the very people he was sworn to protect.

But human nature never changed no matter how dangerous the environment, and there had to be some way to enforce rule and order on those who would dissent. So the Japanese dug into their history and revived the old practices, and weapons, of _bushido. _A sword was much less likely than a stray bullet to ignite flammable gases, after all, or ricochet and piece an external shell open to vaccum. Not only the police were trained in the use of swords; the elite ruling class ordered their own weapons forged in modern furnaces, and taught their children the use of the sword as well as the old doctrines of honor and loyalty. The sword-bearing _samurai,_ lost to legend on Earth, soon emerged as the symbol of the ruling class in space, and within a generation it had become embedded in their culture.

Even now, decades after the reign of the _zaibatsu_ had broken, long after tougher spaceship hulls allowed guns to be brought back into common use, they still commissioned swords for their children and they still trained them all in the art of _bushido._ But, Kurogane thought with grim humor, most of the training nowadays was only a formality, or a sport, never used except in refereed matches.

Not his.

The first two swordsmen reached him, uttering high-pitched battle cries as they struck; but Kurogane was able to easily sidestep one blow and block the other. He'd been right, they moved like they were in an arena; they'd probably never been in real combat in their life. His own return blow was a savage cut at neck level that forced both of his opponents to stumble back with a cry, and he leaped down off the table after them.

The other twp Kajitori had finally pulled together enough to get their own weapons out, but after a certain point superior numbers ceased to be an advantage. They couldn't find footing behind him thanks to the upturned table, and as the four of them tried to crowd into position around him they mostly just got in each other's way. Kurogane was able to fend off their attacks with contemptuous ease, and took advantage of openings to slice them to ribbons.

Unfortunately (Kurogane thought,) the Kajitori were all wearing a set of space-grade workman's suits. Although not exactly body armor, it was woven with carbon nanotubes to make it tough and resistant to damage, and it would blunt all but a killing blow. So instead Kurogane concentrated his slashes on the parts of his enemies that were unprotected - mostly on faces and hands.

A cut to the face of the drunken nephew-Kajitori sent blood spurting, and the man whimpered and sunk to his knees, dropping his sword to clutch at his bloody cheek and ear. That would leave a scar even if he didn't lose the ear - he'd never be so pretty again, Kurogane thought, and snarled with satisfaction. Another man - the almost-sober man who was the closest thing Kurogane had to a real opponent - lost two fingers off his sword hand and went down screaming, and Kurogane tossed his head back and bellowed with laughter.

Kurogane was as drunk on bloodlust as on whiskey, and his vision was still clouded with a haze. He barely heard the sound of shouting beyond the immediate clash of steel and the screams of opponents. He was toying with his opponents, wanting to hurt and humiliate them even if he couldn't kill them - every single dog wearing the Kajitori colors, on Mars, on Earth, in Space, wherever they ran to.

"Look what he did! The crazy bastard!" nephew-Kajitori was wailing from behind him. "Look what he did to my face! To Ichiro's hand! Kill that motherfucker!"

A confusion of shouting distilled to a sullen muttering, and then Kurogane heard the sound that made the hair rise on the back of any swordsman's neck: the tooth-grinding hum of an activated katana.

There was one way in which the weapon of the _zaibatsu_ differed from the swords of old. Times had moved on, and ceramic and nanocarbon armor made to withstand heavy gunfire laughed in the face of a plain steel edge. So the scientists had adapted, and come up with a new weapon; when unpowered it was no more than an ordinary sword, but it also contained an adapter that could channel a powerful surge. The surge couldn't be maintained for long - it ran on a battery, after all - but when activated it set up a micro-edge vibration barely a few atoms wide.

A micro-activated katana - colloquially known as a 'hot' katana - could be pushed into a concrete wall for the full length of its blade with no apparent resistance; it could easily cut through the front and back of any known body armor and didn't even notice the much softer human body parts in between.

The four Kajitori were circling him now with the ugly whine of hot blades coming from every side, and Kurogane's jaw set as he reached for the activation switch on his own sword. "All right," he growled. "You morons want to play with the big boys, then? Your funeral."

None of his opponents were very good, but when swinging a weapon that went through solid steel like warm butter, they didn't have to be. The only thing Kurogane could use to block their attacks was his own hot katana, and if he missed even one, he'd be in at least two pieces on the barroom floor.

Despite that, though, Kurogane wasn't afraid. There was no room in his head for fear. All he had was the rage and hatred, and the certainty that they were the ones who had raised the stakes; he would kill them all and spit on their headless corpses on the floor -

Two of his enemies suddenly jerked and let out a yell as a grip like an invisible hand knocked them off their feet. They went flying in opposite directions to slam against the walls; one of them crashed into a large plate mirror set along the wall and left a broad star-shaped network of cracks on impact. He dropped his weapon, which switched itself off for safety as it left his nerveless hand and tumbled to the floor. The other managed to keep a grip on his, but slashed futilely in the air against nothing as the invisible force kept him pinned. Kurogane glanced over long enough to see Yuui, his hands spread and eyes burning with fear and fury.

"I said stay out of it!" Kurogane snarled, but Yuui shook his head, taking a deep breath and perspiration stood out on his skin.

Nephew-Kajitori tried to take advantage of Kurogane's distraction to attack - but before Kurogane could cut him in half, the man lifted in midair and then spun head over heels before shooting up to slam against the ceiling. Kurogane snarled as he was deprived of his prey, although he couldn't help but take some satisfaction at the sight of the man's legs kicking helplessly in midair as he was pinned against the ceiling.

"Captain Kurogane!" Yuui gasped, and it was obvious from his strained, rigid expression that three opponents were all he could keep pinned this way. Three were out of Kurogane's reach, but that still left one within reach of his sword -

An explosion rang out from behind them, and all three men still standing - Kurogane, Yuui, and the remaining Kajitori - ducked as burning-hot debris rained down on them.

"Deactivate your weapons, now!" a bullhorn-amplified voice came from the doorway. Kurogane glanced aside - keeping his enemies within his field of vision the whole time - to see a squad of men with bright red armbands aiming flechette guns at them from behind the bar. Flechette guns were banned from all space installations even now, but this was Mars, and the Triads favored weapons that would make an impression. A grown man being turned into hamburger in a single shot tended to do that. The bartender hovered in the doorway behind them, and Kurogane was unsurprised to see the man pointing a double-barreled shotgun squarely in his own direction.

Kurogane almost - almost - disobeyed that warning and went for the kill. But the sight of Yuui's wide-eyed, fearful expression was like a rush of cold water dissipating some of the blood fury. With a great effort he took a deep breath, straightened from his attack stance and deactivated the switch on his katana. He slid the weapon back into its sheath with a click and raised both hands in the air.

"You - blondie," the bartender called out, and his voice was gruff but not entirely hostile. "Let the other three go now."

Yuui relaxed his telekinetic holds; the two Kajitori pinned against the walls slid down into heaps on the floor while the third was lowered with a completely unnecessary amount of care onto the floor.

"All right," the squad leader said into the silence, once all of the combatants had stopped moving under the watchful gaze of the flechette guns. "Here's the deal. I don't know what happened, and I don't care. None of our people got hurt, and you didn't bust up any of _our_ equipment, so you'll all get to walk out of here with your legs on. But even if you work for us - suppliers, runners, whatever it is you do, there'll be no more fighting on our turf. You leave now, you don't cause any trouble, you get in your ships and go. Clear?"

"Not so fast," the bartender said, pushing his way to the front. "Easy for you Triads to say, but these assholes smashed up my bar! Who's gonna pay for all that!"

"That crazy bastard -" Nephew-Kajitori mumbled, starting to struggle to his feet, but Kurogane _looked_ at him and he shut up, swallowing as his face paled.

"I'll pay for it," Yuui said before the seething tensions could erupt. Keeping a wary eye on the men with the guns, he hurried over to the bartender and dug in his pockets for his credit chit, and the two of them quickly became involved in negotiations. The Kajitori collected themselves - amid groans and curses - and hurried out, shooting Kurogane searing glances of hatred which Kurogane absorbed without visible emotion. He could have killed them all, and they knew it, and _he _knew they knew it.

The squad leader strolled over to Kurogane, and he clenched his jaw, determined not to be the first one to speak.

"Suwa You-ou?" the man asked in a low undertone, and Kurogane glared at him but did not deny it. The man nodded in satisfaction, and Kurogane realized that as head of security he must have been monitoring Kurogane's conversation with Sonomi.

"The family is aware of your… history with the Kajitori," the man said with a cold, tiny smile that Kurogane wanted to wipe off his face. "The family understands. But understand this. You are traveling under the Triad banner right now, and so were they. You will not take _any_ actions which hinder Triad business from being carried out… not now, nor ever. Our patience and understanding extends only so far, Captain _Kurogane._ Do not test us."

"I'll behave as long as I'm doing this job for you, that's all," Kurogane growled, and the captain shrugged.

"Your cargo is loaded, Captain," the man said in normal tones again, and Kurogane saw Yuui glance over at him. "I would advise that you be on your way as speedily as possible. Lingering in Martian space might be… unwise."

He turned away and walked towards the backroom entrance from which he'd come, but he stopped by Yuui and the bartender before he left. "No need for you to pay anything, my friend," he said, just loudly enough for Kurogane to hear. "The Triads will cover your expenses. You are a formidable kinetic. If your contract - or your relationship - with this volatile freelance captain comes to an end, you really should consider employment with us. We guarantee stability and protection."

Kurogane turned on his heel - splintered glass grated beneath his boot - and stormed for the entrance, snatching his coat and mask off the hood. He was out the door and into the Martian atmosphere before he even finished donning the protective gear, and the howling icy wind was like a punch to the head. He held his breath as he strode through the growing darkness until he'd adjusted the breath mask to fit.

With that head start, he had almost made it to the shuttle before he heard the running footsteps and breathless voice behind him. "Wait, Captain Brawler," Yuui said, and Kurogane slowed as he approached the hatch. "Were you planning to leave without me?"

"Were you planning to take his offer?" Kurogane shot back, and saw Yuui's eyes widen behind the breath mask.

"No, of course not," he said in surprise. "But this isn't about me. What _happened _back there, Captain? You just jumped into a fight like you'd been waiting for one!"

"I told you it was none of your business," Kurogane snapped. "And I thought you were staying out of it!"

"I was, mostly because I wasn't sure _who_ I should be helping!" Yuui returned acidly. "What in _hell_ have you got against the Kajitori that even the mention of their name sends you into a blood fury?"

Silence rang out between them. Kurogane turned away from Yuui, and punched the airlock door open. The two of them cycled through the hatch, and once inside the shuttle they stripped off the heavy outdoor gear and settled back into the shuttle seats for takeoff. Kurogane called up the cargo bay readings, and they registered full; they'd fly heavy with all this onboard, but he'd loaded enough fuel to get them back aboard the Mokona.

Kurogane hoped that Yuui would take the hint, but instead it seemed the man had just moved on to a different question. "You called yourself the… Black Dragon," he said, hesitating slightly before repeating the term. "Of Suwa. What did you mean? What did that have to do with those men?"

"None of your business," Kurogane said shortly.

"Bullshit!" Yuui snapped, his blue eyes flashing. "If you've got some kind of vendetta you're going to drag me into - and the kids, and my brother - then I think it is going to be our business! If you - "

"This isn't the time for history lessons," Kurogane said, cutting him off. "We've got other things to worry about."

"Like what?" Yuui demanded. Kurogane reached over and activated the flight-control screens; the shuttle marked with the Kajitori identifier was screaming away into the sky ahead of them. Kurogane wasn't worried about them; a shuttle that size would have no armaments to speak of, and besides, the Triads' own air forces would be keeping an eye on both of them until they left Martian airspace.

Once back in space, however…

The Kajitori would have some trouble coming up with a plausible explanation for where they'd been and how they'd gotten their injuries. Their superiors would probably have a few hard questions as to where their missing equipment had gone. Those were just details, though. Eventually, they'd have all their masters on the trail like a pack of hounds.

"Getting out of Mars while the getting's good," Kurogane said.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	13. 11: hunted by the evil ones

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise - Chapter 11  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Fai/Yuui, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Although we are both working on all parts of the story, chapter eleven was mostly written by me and chapter twelve was mostly written by Reikah._

* * *

><p>Kurogane remained tense all the way back to the ship, and Yuui couldn't help but mull over what he'd implied. He'd never seen his... companion in a rage like that, and the genuine terror he'd beaten into the Kajitori would soon make way for bluster and then revenge, no matter what; it was the coward's way. Would that mean an attack on the Mokona? Was she even armed? None of her crew had said anything about munitions...<p>

Privately he decided that as soon as they were out of Martian airspace, Kurogane was going to get an earful. He had no right to risk the ship and its occupants because of his _temper tantrums_, whatever the Kajitori had done to him. Black Dragon of Suwa or not, whatever that meant; the kids might know more. Not for the first time he privately cursed his own patchy and insufficient education; the military school had tried its best to even out his knowledge but the problem with history was that there was a lot of it, and more by the hour. He'd picked the advanced coding elective in the academy anyway, because Fai loved programming and said it would be a much more useful course.

The ship's comlink crackled, and Syaoran's earnest voice came through. "Captain, I see you on Mokona's sensors - did the meeting go okay? Do you need me to bring a grav dolly down to the shuttle bay?"

Kurogane leaned forward and hit a button, his jaw set and his face mulish. "Yeah, we got cargo. But we're gonna need to scramble, so stay the hell where you are." He hit another link and the line closed, and Yuui narrowed his eyes at the man; Kurogane caught it in his peripherals, naturally. "Don't look at me like that," he growled.

"Do you really think they'll come after us?" Yuui asked quietly.

"Dunno," said Kurogane. "We'll have to cross the Kajitori trading lines on our way to the Jovian moons. Could go either way." The Mokona loomed up before them, her shuttle bay doors already open; Kurogane tapped a few keys on the console and the autopilot took them in far smoother than any human ever could have.

Yuui hunched in his seat and folded his arms over his chest, and Kurogane glanced over at him and growled. "Listen," he said, as the doors began closing; the light over the airlock leading further into the ship was still red - it wasn't safe to leave the shuttle yet. "We'll get through this. Ship's got enough firepower to see us out."

Yuui thinned his mouth. "Why did you have to attack them in the first place?" he said. "What could they possibly have done that pissed you off so much, Captain Anger Management Issues? I've told you my secrets, the least you could tell me is why."

Kurogane stiffened, and then glared at him. "It's not a fucking _swap meet_," he snapped. "You're not fucking entitled to know everything about me, _spoonbender_."

The mild slur on telekinetics made Yuui fall back, mouth snapping shut as he glared. The light flashed green as Mokona judged the pressure and air sufficient for human habitation, and with a low growl Kurogane pushed his way out of the pilot seat and shoved open the shuttle door. Yuui scrambled after him, but didn't say anything, still stinging with the rebuke. Outside the shuttle bay Kurogane rapped on the glass communications unit with his knuckles until Mokona's rabbit-like avatar appeared there, her ears tilted curiously. He ordered her to find Sakura and send her to the cockpit, and Yuui trailed him as he made his way there himself, his strides long and purposeful. Sakura beat them to it; she was idly swinging in the copilot's chair in her work coveralls when they entered. Syaoran was fiddling with something electric on top of the pilot console; he had a row of screwdrivers laid out before him. They both glanced up and smiled when Kurogane strode in.

"There might be shooting," said Kurogane bluntly, and their smiles vanished. Syaoran grabbed his screwdrivers and began bundling them into a toolbox; Sakura jumped to her feet and zipped her coveralls all the way up to her throat. "The engine good to go?"

"Yes," she said bravely. "It ought to give you six hours' hard burn in a fight, but it'll need to run on half power for a few days after if we're going to get to Jupiter on the same amount of fuel."

Syaoran shoved the toolbox under his desk; he always wore his EVA suit when he was working but he grabbed the helmet and pushed it on. Kurogane nodded at him. "Software is up to date, but the left three canons need looking at," he said through the open window. He pulled up a map on the big screen, and Kurogane folded his arms over his chest and squinted at it before grunting and nodding.

"I'll get those," he said. "We need to get gone, kid. I'll be back here before we cross Kajitori lines. They're the ones who might be taking a potshot at us." He turned on his heel and left while Syaoran's mouth began shaping a question, and both the kids glanced at Yuui uncertainly before Syaoran turned back to the pilot's console and began directing them out.

"What happened, Yuui-san?" Sakura asked quietly. Her face was pale. "You went to see the triads, how could you made the Kajitori so mad?"

"There were some Kajitori in the bar there," Yuui said, slowly. "As soon as Kurogane saw them he just - he just went into a kind of rage, and attacked them. "

Sakura gasped and covered her face in her hands, her eyes wide. "Oh, no," she whispered.

"I can't believe the captain would do that," Syaoran said in a shocked voice. "I always knew that he hated the Kajitori, but I never dreamed that he would…" He trailed off and shook his head.

"Did he kill any of them?" Sakura asked urgently.

"Princess," said Syaoran quietly, his dark eyes on her.

"If he did they'll have a blood feud with him," she said. "It's how the old _zaibatsu_ work, everyone knows that. They're clannish like you wouldn't believe. The Mino don't mind so much as long as you pay restitution, but the Kajitori hunt you down to save face. The Captain told us that."

"No, nobody died. Just a lot of bruises and some nasty cuts," Yuui reassured her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly, recalling details of the fight, he said, "The Kajitori seemed to know who he was. He called himself the 'Black Dragon of Suwa' and they were... spooked. Does that mean anything to you?"

"Suwa?" said both kids sharply, and he blinked at them in surprise and nodded confirmation. They exchanged a look.

"I've never heard of a black dragon," Sakura said. "But Suwa, well, all the spacers know about Suwa. It was…"

"Assume I'm not a spacer," Yuui said dryly. "Who or what was Suwa?"

"There used to be a third space station company," said Syaoran slowly. "Besides the Kajitori and the Mino. Miss Yeng told us about it at school just before Earth tried to... well. Suwa, she said it was called."

"Yes," Sakura agreed, nodding. "I remember. They were the second full space habitation to be finished, not counting the test station. They handled most of the traffic between Earth and Luna, and it made them hugely rich, until..."

"Until what?" Yuui asked.

"There was an accident," said Syaoran. "The space station - the core overheated and exploded. The plating managed to contain the explosion, but there was a design flaw in the hull and the explosion caused a breach into space. Which would have been okay still, the space stations even then were designed to partition in the event of a leak, but -"

"The bulkhead program was corrupted," Sakura finished. "The partitions didn't come down like they should have. It was awful, just terrible. There was no time to evacuate - everyone living on the space station died in the first five minutes. I remember my dad talking about it."

"There were three separate inquiries just by the Martian government since then - the last one was just before, well, we had to leave school," Syaoran supplied the rest of the tale. "It made a huge sensation about safety regulations in space travel and habitation. Ichihara industries made a killing just by programming partition control into their AIs as an extra layer of safety after that."

"I can imagine," Yuui said. He'd met Chairman Ichihara's daughter - Ichihara Yuuko - several times at the psionic academy. She had been a personal friend of the professor's before she'd left the family business to go into politics; a shrewd, sharp woman. "But - fifty years ago? That must have been before the Captain was even born. Were there any survivors? Relatives on other colonies or something?"

The kids looked at each other again, and Sakura shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "I don't remember. It was all before my time, we only learned so much about it because our school used it as a safety training example. Exposure to the deep vacuum is - oh, no, I almost forgot, the Captain will have my head -"

"What?" Yuui said, mystified, but she waved at him quickly and sprinted out the door, choosing to bypass the rails and jump directly to the hallway beyond with a light thump.

"She's gone to get her EVA suit," said Syaoran. "You should do the same. We're coming up to Kajitori lanes now."

"Get my what?" Yuui repeated. His mind was still trying to wrap itself around the news of the Suwa disaster, and trying to connect it with their mysterious captain. He resolved to look up the Suwa disaster in the archives as soon as he had the time, and see if he could find anything about this 'Black Dragon,' too -

"Your vacuum suit," Syaoran said, looking at him solemnly. "It might be dangerous. If there's fighting, there's a possibility we might lose atmosphere. Just in case, everyone needs to be suited up."

"I don't have a suit," Yuui said in puzzlement. "Why would I? I didn't have anything when I came on the ship except the clothes on my back."

Syaoran was staring at him increasingly alarm, as though Yuui had just told him he didn't have a head. "Oh, the Captain's not going to like this," he fretted.

Speak of the devil, the door slid open and Kurogane ducked to fit inside. He was suited up, in a black suit lined with red, but he carried his helmet loosely in one massive hand. His cool eyes swept briefly over Yuui before he turned to Syaoran, blatantly ignoring the blond man. "Get to your post, kid," he said. "We've got some major ass to haul."

* * *

><p>Kurogane settled himself in the captain's chair. Despite the tension singing in his head and neck, he couldn't help but relax a tiny bit at finally being back in his ship, back in control of the universe or at least the most immediate part of it. "Mokona, show us a 3d model of local space on the co-pilot's stand."<p>

Immediately the projection lights lit up, studied at various angles around the table, and a tiny representation of the ship appeared along with a small model of the planet they had just left. Kurogane folded his arms. "Highlight Kajitori-claimed space lanes."

A yellow cylinder appeared, dwarfing the Mokona and disappearing into the distance on either end. His ship was a couple hundred kilometers from the nearest marker; a handful of other vehicles were scattered between them, small numbers floating in the air around them. _Cruising Speed_, read one attached to the model of the Mokona by a thin red thread.

"We will enter Kajitori space in twenty two minutes and 31 seconds," the Mokona said.

"Tch," said Kurogane. "Do a sweep, label all nearby ships in a ten thousand kilometer radius. Kajitori ships in red, any MPS or Earth security ships in green."

Small dots appeared; a cluster of red ones along the edges of the space lane. No green ones, but two blue ones. Kurogane grunted and raised his hand, tapping at those unaffiliated markers with a gloved finger. "Who are these guys?"

"Private yachts registered to Yakusagawa Technologies, Luna LTD. Registered as the _Primela _ and the _Shogo_," Mokona said, and Kurogane snorted dismissively. Small fry, probably some rich kid's private joyride. "The ships registered to the Kajitori Corporation are located on a habitation platform. Our route will take us less than a hundred kilometers from it. Are you sure you wish to continue?"

Kurogane paused, frowning, but Syaoran was the one to pipe up. "Recommend another route to Europa, showcasing fuel expenditure," he said.

The model scrolled out to show the hulking goliath of Jupiter and the small moons orbiting it. Europa's orbit of its gas giant was marked with a ring of white; Mokona traced several routes in pink and said, "Next efficient alternative route adds three months travel time and seven point three two repeating kilograms of fuel."

Kurogane considered it, weighing the risks versus the cost. Then he shook his head; a mercenary captain couldn't afford to bleed profit by jumping at shadows. "That's almost a quarter million yebs. No. We'll stick with our course and hope the Kajitori are too busy yelling at those idiots from Mars to get organized."

"Aye, sir." Syaoran looked dubious, but he punched in the sequence to break the Mokona from its parking orbit and head for the Kajitori lanes.

There was no change inside the ship itself, no change in acceleration or feeling of pressure - nor would they be unless something went very wrong. The hum of the computer and the engines of the ship were the same as always, the routine comm chatter as Syaoran spoke with the Mino and Kajitori traffic controllers to announce their change in position were all completely routine.

Still, Kurogane felt the tension on the bridge ratchet upwards as they approached the limits of Kajitori-controlled space. Damn, this whole Mars trip had turned out to be a disaster. Ruefully he remembered Sakura's "bad feeling" about staying in Mars orbit too long, and regretted - for the first time - his own lack of impulse control. Even if they got out of this one without trouble, this was going to cause serious problems for them the next time they tried to go to Mars _or_ Earth.

He saw from the corner of his eye as Yuui approached and slipped into the unoccupied copilot's chair, but he reminded himself he was ignoring the nosy bastard and focused intently on the display ahead of him.

"So this ship does have guns, after all?" Yuui said in a casual voice, and Kurogane's shoulders twitched. "How very pirate-like of you after all, I was beginning to wonder if you were 'The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.' "

"We're not pirates, we're smugglers," Syaoran corrected him from the pilot's chair. "We don't rob other people."

"We have guns," Kurogane said, ignoring the last jab. "Port and bow side, radial array, 50cm ballistic cannon ports. Seeker ammunition, we have flash jammers on the hull in case anyone tries to shoot back at us. We're not going to be staging any raids on fortified space stations any time soon, but it's enough to defend ourselves."

"And you're the gunner as well as the captain?" Yuui said, propping his chin on his fist as he leaned on the arm of the chair. "Hyuu, Captain Samurai is just full of useful talents!"

Kurogane tried to ignore that, although it was hard, since his neck kept threatening to blush. Syaoran looked up from his own console. "It's a little more complicated than that," he replied. "In an actual fight, the computer does the shooting. Everything happens so fast that a human being would never be able to keep up with it in real-time. But someone has to tell the computer what programs to run, what targets to look for and when to start and stop, and that's the gunner. Captain Kurogane is one of the best there is."

"And you're supposed to be a hotshot pilot, so why don't you look at your map instead of playing Combat Programming 101 with our passenger," Kurogane said sharply. Syaoran looked sheepish and returned dutifully to his console, but the truth was there wasn't much for him to do right now. They had entered the Kajitori space lanes, and that meant that there was only one pre-programmed allowable course that they could let their ship run. Syaoran wouldn't take over manual piloting until they reached the Junction and exited the space lane again.

In some ways the job of the gunner and the job of the pilot were similar; both were ship's functions ultimately handled by computers. When a split-second's hesitation could cause your ship to collide with an unforeseen obstacle - or be shot out of the sky by an enemy - then only computers could react quickly enough and with the necessary precision to move the ship to safety. That went double for the gunner's job, because if you were facing an enemy ship then you could be sure _their_ guns were being manned by computers, too.

But although computers excelled at doing tasks very fast and very precisely, they were terrible at deciding which tasks should be done. Even the AIs were limited in that respect. Computers were the ultimate in good at tactics but bad at strategy; in the end, there had to be a trained, competent human mind behind the keyboard to tell the computer what to prioritize, what evasion course to run, what targeting pattern to fire, when to break off and when to seize the advantage of surprise.

There was another part to it, too; someone had to _write _those flight plans and targeting patterns in the first place. Kurogane had been trained in programming language, of course; pretty much everyone was nowadays, since being able to talk to a computer in the languages it understood was as an essential a skill as being able to read and write. But he would never be more than a passable programmer; his real talent lay in devising tactical patterns, as Syaoran's was in creating flight map vectors. The computer would be the one to actually fire the guns, but _he_ had written the programs it was using, and he would be the one to tell it when to fire.

All in all, though, he really hoped he wouldn't have to fire his weapons on this trip at all. There were too damn many ships around; witnesses as well as potential casualties in an open firefight. But if it came down to that or surrendering his ship - and his passengers - to the Kajitori, Kurogane knew that was exactly what he would do.

He snapped out of his musing as Mokona sounded a discordant tone. "Warning, proximity alert," Mokona's flat voice told them. "Kajitori security vessels on a zero-sixty intercept heading."

"Have they hailed us?" Kurogane snapped, his attention zeroing in on the blood-red icons of the Kajitori ships on his plot.

"No, Captain! I would have alerted you immediately," Syaoran said with just a touch of reproach. "They're moving pretty slowly, and they haven't altered course towards us. It's possible that they're just a routine patrol."

"Anything's possible," Kurogane said, watching the enemy ships intently. "But not likely. Mokona, bring up an outside visual and zoom in on these guys."

The overhead screens obediently blinked into LED display mode, and the vision of the planet below them and the black sky around it flowed past the screen as it zoomed in on the Kajitori ships. There were three of them, and it was clear from their sleek designs that they were security ships, not cargo or passenger. They were moving at a leisurely diagonal across the spacelane, slipping between the other traffic without actually crossing their flight paths. The black and orange logo of the snarling tiger was clearly visible on the ships' hulls.

"Orders, captain?" Syaoran was watching him anxiously.

Kurogane felt a sudden spasm of hatred, and wrestled it down with difficulty. This was not the place to start a fight, not in the middle of a densely populated transit area; even a tiny piece of space wreckage could cause a holocaust if it struck another vehicle at high speeds, as Kurogane had reason to know. He couldn't fire the first shot, but if they did - if he let them get in the first shot… In a dogfight like this, the one that struck the first blow had a huge advantage, and at three-to-one odds, he didn't need any more disadvantages stacked against him.

He felt Yuui watching him intently, and he was reminded of their conversation a week ago, when Yuui had come to his chambers in the middle of the night. He'd berated Yuui for using violence when he didn't need to, for killing people just because he couldn't think of any other option. Just because it would be _easier._ If he meant to remain a man in Yuui's eyes, to say nothing of the kids, he couldn't forget that now.

"Maintain heading and speed," he ordered, his voice somehow managing to come out calm. "Lay low. Play nice. We're just harmless merchant shipping, nothing else. But if they make a move towards us, break for the least-time heading that will get us clear of the lane and out of the way of the other ships."

"Aye, captain," Syaoran said in relief, and turned back to his board.

The tension pounded in his head along with his heartbeat, as the Kajitori ships glided closer to their position. They moved like sharks through the water, arrogant and secure in their superiority over space, and Kurogane tensed with a vicious need to strike them out of the sky even as he battled with his own awareness about how vulnerable his ship was. If pitched firefights with Kajitori security was what he'd wanted, then he shouldn't have bought a merchant ship and filled it with people he cared about…

The Kajitori's heading slid over theirs; at this magnification, the bellies of their ships seemed almost close enough to touch as they passed over the Mokona's roof. Kurogane could count every gunport in the ship's hull, but the ships neither slowed nor twitched from their heading, and Kurogane exhaled a very slow, silent breath. So, he'd been in time after all; no company-wide memo had gone out flagging their ship. Maybe by the time he came back this way, he could change the shape of his hull, get new transponder numbers, repaint to some other color; maybe he would even have a new ship, and they would never be able to track him down.

As the last vision of the Kajitori's thrusters disappeared behind them, the bridge seemed to breathe again. "All right, we're in the clear," he said aloud. "But keep an eye out. We've still got to make it to the Junction before they catch on. Mokona, send up a shipwide alert if any Kajitori vessels even look at us sideways, all right?"

"Acknowledged," the computer said.

Syaoran took a deep breath. "Looks like we're not getting in a shooting war with the Kajitori today after all," he said, bravely forcing humor into his voice.

"Disappointed?" Yuui needled Kurogane, and the taller man scowled at him.

Footsteps came from the hatchway, and Sakura popped up breathlessly. "I made sure everything is secure in the engine room," she reported. She was in her own vacuum suit, except for the helmet which she had hooked onto the straps on her chest. Like most personally owned vacuum suits, which had to be custom-tailored to fit their owners in the first place, Sakura had customized hers; the material of the suit was a pale pink and the latches and decals were in the shape of flower petals. Syaoran was the only spacer Kurogane knew who hadn't bothered to customize his, sticking to the standard tan color with the bulky factory-issued goggle plates. "How are things going up here? I didn't hear any alarms."

"We're clear, Princess," Syaoran told her with a reassuring smile. "The Kajitori didn't even ping us."

"Oh." Rather than cheering up, this news seemed to make Sakura even more uneasy. She frowned, hesitating. "Are you sure?"

All eyes on the bridge turned to Sakura, who flushed unhappily under the scrutiny. "Why do you ask?" Kurogane said quietly.

"Because - well - it's my 'bad feeling,' " she blurted out. She sounded embarrassed to say it, but Kurogane had constantly reassured her that he'd rather chase something that turned out to be a red herring than to not get a real warning when they needed one. "The one I told you about the other day, Captain… it hasn't gone away. If anything it's worse now."

"The Kajitori?" Syaoran asked tensely.

She shook her head helplessly. "I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. Just - ships, and - "

Kurogane turned back towards the 3d display, frowning intensely as he raked over the scattered field of space and ships. They were nearing the Junction now, the place where they could break out of the tightly regulated Kajitori control and set a course for the outer solar system. Traffic was thinning out now, most people having business with the planet below and not the chilly, distant outposts of the system's gas giants.

The crimson icons of the Kajitori were cruising steadily away from them, and no others were within sensor range. The green icons of the MPS patrol had vanished from the plot entirely. The blue -

Kurogane's frown deepend as he leaned forward. The pair of blue icons that Mokona had ID'd as private yachts were still with them; they'd maintained their course behind the Mokona's for the last half-hour. What business could a pair of light pleasure ships have with the Jovian junction? They were hardly rated for deep space travel at all. It might make sense if they were heading for the pleasure resorts of the asteroid belt, but at this time of year those were clear in the other direction.

An uneasy feeling began to creep up his spine. "Mokona, I want you to scan those ships again," he said, tapping his finger in the box of light indicating the two vessels. "Not just their transponder IDs, their history and schematics if you can get them. I want to get a better look at who these guys are."

A full minute passed, as Mokona bounced a signal back to the Mars planetary network to check their files. They crossed over the Junction border back into open space, out of the Kajitori territory, but no one blinked; it was, after all, only a line in space.

"Identities confirmed," Mokona's voice came back, and with a blip the ships' information began to scrawl up on the display. "The _Primela _ and the _Shogo _ are two privately owned vessels. Original manufacturer: Neil Armstrong Construction Industries, Inc. Outfitting and private sale: Yasukagawa Industries, Luna, LTD. Purchased by brothers Mark and Elijah Hamilton of Milan Territory, Italy, Eurasia on June 4th, two thousand -"

"Captain," Syaoran interrupted Mokona's biography, and the strain in his voice caused Kurogane to look over at him. His face was pale. "I know that ship."

"What, you know these guys?" Kurogane asked.

Syaoran shook his head. "No, not the owners," he said. "I know the _ship. _ I know her stats, and I know that's not her real name. When Sakura and I came on this ship I downloaded a file of all the mechanical footprints of the small craft that the EFSS had in its fleet. That ship over there is one of them, and it's not a yacht at all; it's just meant to look like one from the outside."

He met Kurogane's eyes squarely. "It's a fed ship in disguise, Captain," he said quietly. "And it's hunting us."

_Right._ Kurogane inhaled deeply. "That changes things," he said brusquely. "If they're stalking us out into the hinterlands here, it means they don't want to confront us when there's a lot of witnesses around," he said. "That's fine by me. If they're going to try to ambush us, they're going to get a surprise of their own."

"Mokona, battle stations, but don't flash any of the external alarms!" he snapped, turning back to his plot, and the lights in the cockpit turned red as Mokona began to switch over to combat mode. In battle mode all of the nonessential ship's functions would be shut down; even life support and gravity would be turned to a minimum as all power shunted over to the propulsion and munitions systems.

Kurogane yanked his helmet on and snapped the seals into place, glancing quickly around to confirm that the kids were doing the same. Sakura's suit always privately struck him as ridiculous, with pink glitter on the helmet and a tinted visor, but it would protect her from vacuum and that was what mattered.

He turned towards Yuui, intending to reassure his passenger that he had no intention of giving either him or his brother up to the feds. Then stopped when his mind registered what exactly was so out of place about Yuui on the bridge; he wasn't wearing a suit.

_He wasn't wearing a goddamned vacuum suit._

"You idiot!" he bellowed, his voice muffled by the faceplate; he snapped it up in order to better convey his glare. "Where the hell is your suit? I told you and Sakura both to get suited up over an hour ago!"

"I," Yuui stuttered, as Syaoran's voice came over their internal suits' radio; "He doesn't have one, captain."

"What the hell d'you mean, he _doesn't have one?" _ Kurogane snarled, his mind reeling with the unbelievable absurdity of the statement. "What kind of brain-dead flipper-fingered_ idiot _goes on any kind of long-term space-travel without a vacuum suit in tow?"

"I never had one!" Yuui shouted back at him. "Why would I? I never even planned to go into space! I was lucky to get myself and my brother out, let alone stop and buy a vacuum suit on the route!"

It was just absurd. It would have been funny if it weren't so horrifyingly dangerous. No space traveller - _especially_ not one raised in a space habitat - would go anywhere without their custom-fitted vacuum suit somewhere close by, and they always maintained a constant awareness of where the suit was and how fast they could get into it. Every stationer had one, children grew through them and passed them down like clothes when they got too big; it was a moment of pride when you got old enough to have one specially issued for you. Syaoran wore his on board out of habit, even when there was no danger; even dome-raised Sakura understood the importance of keeping a breath-support system available. Only an Earthie - only a stupid, unprepared, witless infant of an _Earthie - _ would not even consider the danger.

Just the thought of what could happen if they took a direct hit to their ship made the hair stand up on the back of Kurogane's neck in horror. He whirled around and grabbed Sakura by the shoulder.

"Take him to the ship's lockers," he ordered her tensely. "Get him fitted in our spare suit - it _should_ be big enough for him. Then both of you get into the engine room and stay there!" The engine room had the heaviest shielding in the ship; it had to, if it had any hope of containing the blast in case of engine failure. The same superdense plating that encased the engine room and provided gravity for the rest of the ship would laugh at any ship-mounted missile; once in there, they'd be safe.

"Aye, captain!" Sakura said - he only heard her over the radio, since she had intelligently kept her helmet closed. He would have _skinned_ her if she had opened it now. She saluted and turned back to the hatch, feeling her way down the ladder carefully in the bulky suit.

He turned to Yuui - so skinny, so frail, so _unprotected - _and fury burned through him with all the force of his fear. "Follow her," he snarled. "Get the suit and get to safety. We don't have time to stop and coddle a stupid dirtboy in the middle of a firefight!"

Yuui looked at him, mouth hanging open as he tried to shape words; then he whirled away and followed Sakura down the hatch.

Kurogane tried to put them both out of his mind as he seated himself at the captain's chair and called up the tactical plot with steady hands. The two icons - now switched over to a flaming red in the display - were closing up on them. The further they got away from civilization, the more obvious it would be to the Mokona that the 'space yachts' were not what they seemed. Sooner or later Syaoran's evasive course would tip the hunters off that their prey was on to them, and then they would have no reason to hold back.

Mokona had a greater acceleration than these ships, and was equipped for deep-space travel where these ships were not. But with the range so close, there was no time to run; they'd have to either destroy both ships outright or knock out the propulsion systems. He'd back Syaoran's evasive piloting against anyone in the solar system, but it was critical they stay out of the crossfire and not let the enemy get a hit in on their own thrusters. If they -

Then the first missile fired, screaming soundlessly across space towards them, and he didn't have time to think of anything else.

* * *

><p>Yuui and Sakura pounded down the curving interior that led to Mokona's inner storage lockers, and wondered when the hundred meters of gently curving hallway had gotten so <em>long. <em> The corridor lights had gone red, an ear-shattering siren played over Mokona's speakers, and the gravity was much lower than usual - it should have made this run easier, but instead it just seemed to stretch out into eternity.

There was a stomach-twisting wrench - the ship making a sharp course change that not even the artificial gravity could compensate for. Both of them were thrown off their feet; Yuui managed to right himself with his telekinesis, but Sakura was jolted off course and had to stagger to the nearest corridor wall to stop her momentum.

"What's happening to the gravity?" Yuui demanded, but Sakura just shook her head. She pointed at her helmet and mouthed something at him through the faceplate; _No radio,_ Yuui was just able to make out through the thick red light. With her footing stable once more, Sakura beckoned to him as she launched off down the corridor. Yuui followed, his pulse pounding thickly in his ears. In the weeks he'd spent on board, he'd gradually gotten over his terror of the vacuum of space outside, yet now it was back, no longer an irrational phobia but a very real and all too likely danger.

Why had no one told him of this oh-so-important need for a vacuum suit? All right, maybe he should have thought of it himself; but he'd never travelled in space before and it just didn't occur to him to ask about such things. He still had a fair amount of money left, he could have bought one in the days they'd been stuck in Mars orbit; now it was too late.

Too late for a lot of things. He followed Sakura down the Mokona's corridor which had never seemed so long, and didn't know what to think except for a numb, constantly repeating hope that the seals on Fai's triage chamber really were airtight.

The next moment the universe convulsed around them, as something hit the side of the Mokona's hull like a sledgehammer. The _walls_ themselves - six meters thick of ceramic shielding and titanium-alloy bulkhead - heaved and buckled like an earthquake, and the shockwave rippled out through the air an instant later and threw both of them against the hallway floor.

Yuui's limbs were numb and his ears were ringing; he saw one of the padded handgrips inches from his nose and grabbed onto it with a clumsy hand that felt like it was wrapped in mittens. As the first deafness began to clear, he heard a high-pitched screaming noise and looked frantically around. Sakura's suit-gloves had failed to find a purchase, and she was sliding backwards across the corridor with her hands grabbing frantically for a hold.

"Sakura!" Yuui shouted hoarsely, and reached out and _yanked_ her back towards him with his telekinesis. He grabbed her in his free arm and turned them both back to the wall, both of them grabbing for a better handhold as the force of the blastwave continued to rocket past them.

No -

He could see into Sakura's faceplate now, and although her eyes were wide in terror her mouth was closed. But the screaming noise continued, rising in force and pitch to an unearthly shriek, and so did the terrible wind that threatened to peel them from their perch.

Yuui twisted his head around, dreading what he knew he would find, and the place where the corridor ceiling should have been was a twisted wreckage. The solid metal had peeled apart like someone punching a nail through a sheet of tinfoil, and in the gap between the distended metal edges was the vicious deep blackness of space.

The air roared past them with the force of a hurricane wind; the half-gravity of the ship's core was doing nothing at all to hold them in place against that deadly vortex. Yuui saw _now_ the wisdom of placing the padded handholds on seemingly ridiculous places inside the ship's surface. Between that anchor, and his own powerful kinetic ability, they wouldn't be sucked out.

They wouldn't, but what about the air? Yuui couldn't think above the howling wind, couldn't stop to do the calculations about how much volume of air the Mokona contained and how fast it was whistling out the gap in a spray of frozen water vapor. The force would lessen as the air pressure dropped, but what good would that do them? They would freeze, but first they would suffocate, and when they passed out for lack of oxygen they would be pulled through the gap all the same.

Sakura's gloved fist was pounding on Yuui's chest, trying to get his attention. She pointed upwards towards the deadly hole in the sky, and her lips were moving behind her faceplate; her shoulders were shaking as she tried to shout her message to him. But even if the noise of the wind hadn't deafened him, her suit was sealed; no noise escaped.

Yuui shook his head, and Sakura's face screwed up in an agony of indecision. Suddenly she moved within the circle of her arms, and he had to grab her and slam her back against the wall as she reached up with both hands and twisted her helmet, breaking the airtight seals. A cry formed on Yuui's lips to stop her, force the helmet back onto her head, but her ginger hair was whipping around her face in a frenzy as she pulled the helmet free.

"The ship, Yuui-san!" Sakura shouted at the top of her lungs, the words barely more than a whisper against the shrieking gale. She pointed at the hull breach again. "The ship can heal itself! It can seal the holes! But not like this!"

"What?" he shouted back, hardly even able to hear his own words.

She leaned up to put her mouth close to his ear, and he could feel the violent trembling of her limbs as she clung to her perch and her helmet at the same time. "The ship's hull is make of self-healing materials!" she shouted. "And Mokona can apply a seal over a small breach so it can work, but not with a hole that big! The edges are too far apart. They have to be forced back together so Mokona can seal them!"

Her words stuck Yuui, flashed through his head and grounded like a lightning bolt. He stared at Sakura in incomprehension, his chest working furiously as he heaved for breath in the increasingly thin air. No. She couldn't mean -

But she did, and they had no time, and Yuui knew what he had to do.

He turned to face the breach in the hull, the twisting edges of the gap that framed a darkness deeper than any night he'd ever seen on Earth.

He let go of his hold on the wall, and let the wind take him.

* * *

><p>Sakura stared upwards, mouth parted in dismay, as Yuui-san slid off his feet and began to floated towards the breach in the hull. He <em>had<em> to be using his telekinesis to brake himself, or else he would have been sucked much faster and more violently towards the breach. As it was, he drifted in fits and starts, skidding a few inches upwards before braking his momentum with a visible effort.

It was getting hard to breathe - the wind was lessening slightly as the atmospheric pressure dropped, but they had to get that breach closed soon if Mokona was going to be able to restore enough air to breathe. "Warning: Atmospheric integrity in the inner ring has been compromised," Mokona's automated alarm was playing over and over the ship's comm, but Sakura couldn't spare the time to turn her off. "Breach diameter exceeds selfheal capacities. Immediately evacuate to another portion of the ship and initiate EVA repairs."

Sakura struggled awkwardly with her helmet, trying to fix it back on one-handed while her other hang was jammed nervelessly into the anchor by the wall. It wasn't easy to maneuver the big, clumsy helmet one-handed and against the wind, but she had just managed to get it over the head - although the seals weren't yet in place - when suddenly the ship heaved yet again.

It wasn't another missile hit - it was another sharp course correction as Syaoran rolled the ship in a desperate evasion course to keep them clear of enemy fire. But the gravity fluxed and ebbed as the thrusters sucked greedily on the engine output, and Sakura screamed helplessly as the floor suddenly became the ceiling, and she was hanging one-handed above a fall that went on forever.

She had no attention to spare for Yuui, no attention for _anything_ but clinging desperately for dear life; gradually the ship's grav systems, responding sluggishly on their throttled system priority, adjusted to the new heading and the floor was the floor again. Sakura gulped a sob as her feet touched solid ground; the roaring vortex no longer threatened to pluck her from her perch.

The winds had lessened because the air was almost all gone, Sakura realized with a stab of terror, and she looked around wildly - the stupid helmet restricted her vision - for Yuui-san. He hadn't been holding onto anything, and _he didn't have a space suit - _ if he'd been sucked out, what was Sakura to do -

Yuui-san was braced spread-eagled against the hull beside and partially covering the gap, and Sakura cried out in gladness as she saw him moving. As Sakura fumbled to finish sealing her helmet she looked desperately for some way to help him - there was almost no air left, and he couldn't hold his breath forever. "Warning: Atmospheric integrity in the inner ring has been breached," Mokona said _completely_ redundantly in her ear. "Immediately evacuate and initiate EVA repairs."

Slowly and painfully, Yuui-san shifted himself until he was positioned almost directly in front of the hull breach, hands resting on the two biggest fragments of the shattered hull. His body tensed and strained, hands twisting on the jagged metal as though he could force the pieces back into place by sheer muscle strength alone.

It was impossible. Sakura _knew _it was. Human strength wasn't even in the range of magnitude necessary to shift the monstrous bulk of a spaceship hull; it took heavy-duty industrial equipment to bend the cast duralloy into place. But slowly, centimeter by centimeter, the pieces of the hull were bending back to cover the gap.

Not far enough - air still whistled through a gap half a meter wide, and Mokona could only seal breaches of a decimeter or less. But then Yuui-san brought his legs up to brace himself against the hull, and Sakura clearly saw a shower of bright ice particles stream from his lips as he let out the last of his breath.

The last of the metal shards seemed to _flow_ into place, as though the half-meter-thick metal were hot wax to be molded. At last the broken edges melded meekly into place, the freezing wind tearing fitfully through a spiderweb of cracks only a few centimeters wide. The deadly suction ebbed away at last.

And Yuui-san fell. If not for the half gravity, he would have hurt himself quite badly, or Sakura when she scrambled with her arms held out underneath him. As soon as he was clear of the breach Sakura keyed up her internal ship's mike. "Mokona!" she cried. "Seal the breach in outer hub corridor section jay-seven-delta!"

A thin hiss sounded through the corridor walls, and a pale green substance jetted out from the walls and floor of the corridor towards the deadly spiderweb. It was smartheal plastic, filled with nanobots programmed to ooze into the tiniest cracks and then expand and solidify to form an impermeable seal. It would make the corridor airtight and safe again until someone could get to the outside of the hull and weld replacement armor over the breach; for now, they were safe.

"Atmospheric integrity is compromised in the inner hallway," Mokona said in her ear over the ship's mike, sweetly calm against the horrors of the last few minutes. "Inner seals are holding. Shifting life-support functions to compensate."

Air began to hiss back into the hallway from Mokona's lifesupport vents - something the ship's protocols would have been forbidden to do while the section was still open to space. It was more sluggish than it would have been if Mokona's processing power was still not diverted to munitions and piloting, but Sakura didn't care; she ripped her gloves off and reached to Yuui-san's throat to feel for a pulse.

She found one, faint but steady, and Sakura couldn't help a joyful squeal that echoed inside her helmet. But the tall man wasn't moving, his skin was icy to touch, and his lips and fingernails were blue. Sakura was Martian; she knew the symptoms of anoxia and hypothermia all too well, as any spacer did.

Fortunately, she also knew what she needed to do. She scrambled to her feet and stooped carefully, pulling Yuui-san's limp body across her chest and shoulder. In full gravity she could never have done it; as it was she puffed and wheezed inside her poorly sealed suit as she gained her feet.

"Mokona, unlock the infirmary and prep a lifesupport bed," she cried as she staggered down the endless hallway. There was no more thought of retreating to the shielded interior of the engine room to wait until they were safely out of combat. The next five minutes could mean life - or death.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	14. 12: my will to survive is there

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: Some space-battle terminology borrowed from David Weber here.  
>SSEAL = Space, Sea, Air &amp; Land. All-terrain, no terrain!<p>

* * *

><p>Yuui faded in and out of consciousness. He was aware of some things; that he was on the ship, and that he was being moved. Everything else was lost behind the deep-seated ache in his chest, the way his throat worked desperately, hoarsely, as he tried to suck in air and couldn't. He had the barest impression of grey steel floors and Sakura's pink workboots, and her arm underneath his shoulders as they walked, but it was distant, irrelevant compared to his desperate need for air.<p>

"Just hold on, Yuui-san," Sakura's voice came to him from far away, as he coughed and tried to gasp for breath he couldn't find. "We're almost there."

_Fai_ , he thought muzzily. _Fai, where are you?_His twin should be here, that was how it always was, sickness and health and bad times and the fact that Fai wasn't here was bad news and he twisted weakly in his rescuer's grip, trying to find enough oxygen to speak - to call for him, because Fai must be close, they were never separated, and what had happened that they were?

He was hyperventilating, his body desperately trying to get enough _air_ , and hysterically he told himself to calm down even as he knew it was counter-productive. His rescuer's rough space suit - _who, who was it, he thought he knew but thinking was so hard and his memory was slippery, refusing to focus_- against his skin was almost a grounding point.

He was so cold.

"Mokona! Help!" a girl yelled from somewhere far away, her voice tinny and quiet; and then something plastic was being shoved mercilessly into his face. He tried to fight it, but he was so tired, his lungs ached, and all he could do was roll his head away; gloved fingers gripped his chin none-too-gently and the plastic thing was forced up against his mouth and nose. "It's a breath mask, Yuui-san, don't fight it," the stranger in the pink space suit ordered tersely as she wound the mask's strings around his head, tightening them to keep it in place, and then there was a soft click and suddenly there was... there was _air_.

"Blood oxygen levels are critically low," said a robotic voice, and she made a small frustrated noise. "Recommend patient be moved to infirmary bed and secured."

"I - I can't lift him," the girl said raggedly. "Could you -"

Gods, but Yuui hadn't known pure oxygen could taste this sweet.

"Demitting the infirmary bed," the inhuman voice replied, followed by the hum of machinery. Yuui rolled his eyes feebly in their sockets, trying to focus on her; he couldn't sense Fai, what was wrong? Where was he? There were fluorescent lights marching across the ceiling, and a sharp smell of disinfectant. Was he in a hospital? He hadn't been in a hospital since... Fai had pneumonia."I suggest you transfer the patient onto it from ground level."

The girl didn't reply, but her hands on his shoulder tightened as she tried to half-push, half drag him across the smooth ceramic floor. He fought her as best he could, digging his fingers and heels in, but there was no purchase to be found on the smooth floor and his joints ached. The room was so warm, and he was so cold and so tired and the oxygen was so good, but he couldn't stay here, he had to find Fai, Fai not being here was such a bad thing, they went everywhere together -

"There," said the girl, standing up as the bed began to rise from the floor. Metal arms unfolded from the walls, spider-like things with glinting sharp metal brandishes, and Yuui hissed quietly and tried to lean away from it, but the bed had railings and his limbs were loose and uncooperative, and he just didn't have the energy... The girl in pink glanced at the unit the arms had unfurled out of and said, "What's that?"

"An injection to counteract some of the effects of oxygen deprivation," the robot replied woodenly. "Primarily an agent to reduce blood thickening." The arm lowered itself toward his face and then slipped alongside his head; moments later Yuui felt a brief sting in his throat, under his ear. The girl picked up one of his hands and held it between her gloves, smiling at him reassuringly, and the frantic thudding of Yuui's heart against his ribs began to ease. Her green eyes were familiar. Perhaps she knew where Fai was.

"His hands are so cold," she said, sounding troubled. "Should I fetch the blankets?"

"Affirmative," the computer (Mokona?) said, and she turned away, opening a cupboard along the far wall and shaking out a green blanket before draping it over him fastidiously. She even tucked it around his feet, and glanced up at him when she was done, flashing him another soothing smile. Her familiarity was growing on him with every breath of oxygen enriched air through the mask, some of the confusion beginning to fade. He was on a ship. This was the infirmary. There had been... something, he'd done something, and he was cold...

"Fai. I want Fai," he tried to say, but his voice was weedy and thin and raspy, barely more than a breath, and all he succeeded in doing was fogging up the breath mask with water vapor. There was something very important about Fai, something he needed to do, and the kind girl with the green eyes might be able to help...

"I am preparing an IV to combat dehydration and glucose insufficiency," said the computer. "Please remove the patient's left arm from the blanket."

_Sakura_ , Yuui realized, as she held his arm out for the AI. _Her name is Sakura, and she - the ship, there was a - Fai_. The Mokona's robotic arm daintily lowered to his skin, her three-fingered 'claws' clutching a pad of gauze, and the coldness of the medical alcohol against his skin reminded him of his brother's location. He flexed his wrist hard, pulling it out of Sakura's grip and away from the arm with the needle, but she just caught it again, her grip stronger now.

"It's alright, Yuui-san," she said. "Mokona is just going to get you an IV, you'll be fine -"

He shook his head violently. _Fai_, he mouthed at her desperately, but the water vapor of his breath was still condensed on the mask. That missile had come right through the wall, what would happen if their cabin was hit next? He tugged at her grip ineffectively and her brows drew together; ship's engineer or not, the fact that he couldn't even break the grip of a teenage girl said volumes about his strength.

"Patient is advised to cease movement. He is presenting symptoms of moderate hypothermia and anoxia, as well as epidermal swelling and minor capillary damage consistent with exposure to external vacuum."

"Please be quiet, Mokona - Yuui-san, what is it?" Sakura's green eyes were fixed on him, wide with concern, and Yuui raised his free arm - _oh, how it ached_ - and fumbled at the mask. Oxygen - _Fai_- he had to... "You can't take the mask off! Yuui-san, what-?"

Yuui managed to pull at the breathing mask until it was no longer covering his mouth, and the precious oxygen was cool on his face. He opened his mouth to speak and began coughing, wet coughs deep from his chest. Alarm flashed across Sakura's face, and she moved as though to force the mask back down; he swiped sluggishly through the air and caught her hand in his. "Sakura," he said, hoarsely, trying to make eye contact. His thoughts were still too fast in his head, and he struggled to make himself clear. "In my - my... my Fai, he's..."

Comprehension dawned. "Your twin? Oh, Yuui-san. I'm sure he's fine - the hatches sealed off during the leak, I'm sure he's perfectly safe -"

"I have to... have to. Check." Thinking was hard, he was so tired, and everything hurt, but he couldn't... not until he knew Fai was safe. Fai depended on him. If something happened, he didn't...

"You're not leaving this infirmary," said Sakura, firmly. "They might well still be fighting. I haven't felt any hits, but -"

"He's only here because of me," Yuui whispered, and Sakura paused.

"Mokona, have there been any hull breaches in the habitation ring?" she queried. Released from its gagging order, the AI replied immediately in the negative, and then asked in a voice that might be considered peevish if the ship was capable of feeling peeved whether or not she could administer the IV to her patient.

Yuui shook his head. The air here felt wrong, and his head felt so muzzy; he had a headache building up just behind his right eye, but Fai was in danger and he couldn't just sit here. Sakura leaned over him, her green eyes bright with worry, and said, "Yuui-san, you were just exposed to open space - you can't leave. Mokona says your brother's alright, I'm sure he is!"

"No!" he snapped, and her eyes widened. Fretfully he pushed at the blanket. " _No_, things don't - I can't, I, I let them take him away and I was too slow coming for him and he's, he's, he's not - I _can't_-"

"Permission to administer sedative?" Mokona asked.

"No!" Yuui said, immediately, and Sakura hesitated.

"Yuui-san," she said, and put one of her hands on top of his. "Listen. What if I go and check on your brother for you?"

"Unadvised," Mokona said immediately. "Combat protocols are still in effect -"

"I know," Sakura said bravely. "But this isn't the engine room, either. I'm no safer here than I would be anywhere else in the ship, and I have a suit." She tapped her helmet with gloved fingers and smiled at him ruefully.

Yuui swallowed and latched onto the the relevant part of her offer like a drowning man. "You'll go?" he asked, urgently. "You'll go see Fai? He's... he has to be... Please..." His eyes were stinging, he realized, and the blurriness of his vision wasn't down to shortage of air; too tired to raise his arms, he turned his head and rubbed the tears away against his sleeve.

Sakura squeezed his hand gently. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I'll go do it. Please, Yuui-san. Stay here. You saved the ship, I'll certainly check on your brother for you." She climbed off the bed and stood up, turned away from him so he couldn't see her face through the helmet visor, and part of Yuui tried to find the strength to reject her offer - how could he put her at risk? - and was promptly overruled by the rest. He was so tired. So long as Fai was being checked on, did it matter who did it?

"Thank you," he whispered.

Sakura rose and went to the doorway of the infirmary, tapping the lights down to half-illumination. She checked a red blinking light on the panel and frowned. "Mokona, is the hallway pressurized enough for me to open this door?" she asked.

"Not advised," Mokona replied. "Atmospheric pressure is at thirty-four percent."

"Better than zero. All right, here I go," Sakura said, and the door whooshed open. A draft whipped through the room as Sakura slipped through the door and shut it behind her, and Yuui was assailed by a sudden horrifying vertigo as he remembered a hungry roaring wind pulling him out into the bottomless _blackness_. He almost cried for Sakura to come back, to hold his hand so he wouldn't get pulled out, but she was going to check on Fai and Fai was more important right now.

So he just lay on the infirmary bed with his jaw clamped shut and his fists clenched, ignoring the stinging pain of the IV, until the door was shut and the hissing noise was gone.

With Sakura gone, it was increasingly hard to stay awake; the room was dim and the infirmary bed and its blankets were so warm. Yuui turned his head into the pillow, feeling the last of the tears leak from his eyes, and just breathed until sleep took him.

* * *

><p>The light glinted off the knife blade, and Yuui lowered himself down, shifting his centre of balance as he weaved from side to side as he had been taught, in a fluid movement designed to make him a harder target. His opponent was much taller than him, and with a longer reach, but Yuui wasn't alone; Fai was circling the man silently, his feet whispering over the mats. Their enemy shifted easily to keep track of his twin, and his hand on the blade tensed; Yuui could feel his palms tingling as he dug his feet into the mats, ready to meet the charge their opponent was signaling, only to be foiled as the man whipped around and flung the knife at Fai.<p>

His twin ducked fast but their opponent was on him then, fists flashing as he struck heavily at Fai's face, and Fai dodged these two but he was being driven backwards across the mats and he was running out of space, and Yuui hissed in agitation and lunged himself, aiming a spinning kick at their assailants' right-hand side only to have his foot caught by the ankle. He was unceremoniously yanked off his feet and dumped face-first on the ground, their opponent dancing away from him and sweeping up the discarded knife; he came at Fai fast and low and his twin didn't dodge it in time.

The knife sank up to its hilt in his belly, and Fai let out a startled cry - Yuui could feel a moan of disbelief rise up in his own throat - and the taller man stepped back, folding his arms over his chest and shaking his head. "Well," he said. "That wasn't very good, was it?"

"We've only been doing this for a few months," Fai said sullenly, and his assailant sighed and raised a hand, pinching his nose. He was still wearing his spectacles.

"Yes, you have. Long enough for me to have drilled some of the basics into you. Yuui, where did you fail there?"

"Um," said Yuui, picking himself up off the floor, "I didn't react fast enough to your feint."

"And?" Their instructor picked up the retractable knife from the floor, but the set of his shoulders was patient. "Where else?"

Yuui fidgeted. It was an old complaint. "Not enough teamwork," he muttered.

Kazuhiko straightened up, shaking his head. "No," he said. "Not enough _initiative_ . You always wait for Fai's signal before attacking, but sometimes _you_need to make the first move. And Fai, you need to stop trying to always take the lead, and to stop trying to direct Yuui's movement in a fight."

"I didn't say anything to him," Fai protested indignantly, and Kazuhiko raised an eyebrow and grinned at him.

"I was a Lunar SSEAL back in the fifties," he said. "I know non-verbal orders. Now, you want to take another go?"

Yuui nodded eagerly, and Kazuhiko held out his prosthetic hand and helped him up off the floor.

Combat training was his favorite class the military school offered. Not so much the subject matter - although it was nice, learning how to defend himself, learning how to be strong - but because of the instructor. Kazuhiko was an old Earth Navy veteran, a four-term elite serving with Earth's space faring commandos, and he knew his stuff. He'd served in a wonderful array of operations, most of which he couldn't talk about with his students for security reasons. He wasn't a full-time faculty member - he was here on medical leave as he adjusted to a new prosthetic arm; he'd lost his real one in a mission - but he was polite, and fair, and competent, and Yuui thought he was the best instructor the academy offered.

He'd also spotted the potential in the two of them from his very first session with them, and to Yuui's not-so-secret delight, he liked what he'd seen enough to have them released from (most) of their chores to come back to his gym after class was over to train with him. "You came to this fighting thing late," he said, "but you've both got great hand-eye co-ordination and you're fast. If you want to go anywhere in the military, you need to go into space, and I can teach you what you need to get into one of the better companies."

"Like yours?" Yuui had asked, and Fai shot him a brief, unreadable look.

"Maybe in a decade or two," Kazuhiko replied, laughing. "For now I'm going to start you off with small arms."

Their hand-eye coordination translated very well into marksmanship, it turned out. Yuui didn't like the old-fashioned guns that spat superheated metal - he didn't like the way they kicked in his hand - but with a particle beam he was pretty deadly, and when Kazuhiko gave him a thumbs up and a nod of approval it made him smile and flush with pride. No adult had been so generous with their praise to him before now. Kazuhiko didn't fawn or make a big deal of it, but when they messed up he corrected them without censure and when they did good he let them know.

The man treated them like equals, like valued students rather than vermin or toys, and all in all it made Yuui glad to be staying at the school. Fai was frosty and somewhat aloof, mostly because after their first few sessions it became apparent that Kazuhiko had no problems telling them apart - and that he was shamelessly giving Yuui the lion's share of his attention. Secretly Yuui didn't mind so much. It was easier to talk to him than it had been to anyone else who was not-Fai, and he liked the sharpness in the man's eyes.

All in all, it took him longer than it should have to realize what was going on there, and in the end it was Fai who told him.

Kazuhiko was teaching them _capoiera_, a Brazillian martial art that relied on fluidity and evasion rather than heavy punches or kicks. It was slow going, and for all his combat prowess Kazuhiko himself wasn't the best at it, but he'd picked the discipline out as befitting their quickness and agility and he had been right to do so. They seemed to spend an awful lot of time sparring against each other, both during class and after, and every night they fell asleep tired and aching but with the satisfaction of feeling like they'd accomplished something. They shared a dormitory with eight other boys, so the exhaustion bought on by training helped soothe them both since they couldn't climb into bed with each other in front of all these witnesses.

Right until one day, maybe six months after their arrival at the school, Fai slipped in between Yuui's covers anyway. It was long past light's out and Yuui was asleep; it was the movement between the sheets that awoke him. His breath caught in his throat as Fai seized his shoulder, tugging at it as he tried to position himself around Yuui as he liked. Yuui stiffened, resisting him. It was dark and the other boys were snoring but this... this was dangerous, and he knew it. "What are you doing?" he whispered, his voice barely more than an exhale in the space between them, and Fai stilled.

"Come on, Yuui," he whispered back. "Let's..."

Yuui shook his head. " _No_, " he hissed. "Go back to bed, Fai, we can't -"

"But I haven't for ages," Fai said. "I haven't touched you for weeks, not since the old classroom on the third floor - Yuui, come on -"

"No!" Yuui snapped, his face flushing despite himself. Yes, he remembered that classroom, their lunch break and the wooden desk under his bare thighs as Fai kissed him, his hand wrapped around both of them and his cheeks pink with haze and lust. "Go back to bed before we're caught, Fai!"

Fai didn't answer, but he didn't move, either. His thumb pressed into the meat of Yuui's shoulder and rubbed back and forth slowly. "Do you not want this anymore?" His voice was very small, and Yuui blinked in confusion.

"What?" he asked, stupidly, and Fai curled toward him slightly. In the darkness of their dorm it was impossible to see his face.

"_This_, " he whispered. "Me. Are you... are you tired? Of this?"

Yuui shook his head, his stomach fluttering, and decisively bent and pressed a kiss to Fai's forehead. "No," he whispered. "But we can't be caught again, Fai, _we can't_. We'll lose this place and I... I don't want to go."

"Because of Kazuhiko," said Fai, and there was ugly note in his voice.

Yuui gawped at him, trying to process this non-sequitor, but no matter how he turned the comment he couldn't make it fit. "I don't understand," he said slowly, and Fai huffed out a warm stream of hot air against his skin.

"Don't lie to me," he said, miserably. "It's - you _like_him, Yuui, your face changes when he's around and you smile and I don't - I don't like it. Okay? I don't."

"I don't have a crush on Kazuhiko-sensei," Yuui protested, his cheeks burning. "He's just kind, is all."

"Yeah, kind is obviously why you make eyes at him all the time," Fai snapped, and Yuui pushed him away, hurt. He hadn't been _making eyes_at Kazuhiko-sensei. The man was smart, and funny, and easy on the eyes sure, with that short dark hair all bristling and wild and that intelligent look in his eyes... and the muscle under his shirt, which Yuui had happened to catch one evening because he'd been in the wrong place at the time, even if he'd only been in that wrong place because he'd overheard Kazuhiko-sensei say he was going to take a shower and busied himself out in the gym putting away equipment they hadn't even used, and if his insides twisted into new shapes when Kazuhiko-sensei praised him for his performance it was only because praise was a new thing for him...

_Oh_, he thought, miserably.

"Fai," he said, and stopped. They weren't touching, and it was too dark to see him, but he could feel Fai's tension from here. He licked his lips and tried to think of something to say.

"You never had a crush on me," Fai said in a low, wounded voice, and the tightness in Yuui's heart eased. He almost laughed if he hadn't sensed how unwise it would be. This, this was something he could soothe.

He eeled his way over the mattress until Fai was pressed against him again, and raised a hand to lay it gently on his brother's waist. Fai tilted his head, and the suggestion of shadows indicated he was watching Yuui's face. "Fai," he murmured, "I never needed one. It's... you and me, and you're... you're more than that. Do you see?"

"No," came Fai's flat reply.

Yuui reached down and nuzzled gently at his twin's face until he could bump their foreheads together. Fai didn't fight him, and he sensed that his twin was waiting for an answer. "I can't have a _crush_ on you," he said, "Because I've had you all my life, and you're more than something I can crush on. Does that make sense? Fai, I... I don't crush on you because _I love you_, because you're more than that, because you're _me_."

Fai hesitated a few seconds, and then gave in. His nose brushed against Yuui's as he returned the contact, his breath hot on Yuui's face. "If he wanted to touch you," Fai whispered, his tone making it obvious what he meant by _touch_. "Would you let him?"

Yuui flushed. " _No_, " he retorted, and he meant it. Being around Kazuhiko-sensei made him feel fuzzy and warm, but the prospect of anyone other than Fai touching him, of seeing him, was a strange one. He shook his head and felt a shudder travel up his spine at the thought. "No," he repeated, "Because I'm yours."

Fai darted forward to kiss him then, searingly, possessively. His lips were chapped and rough and Yuui kissed him back, tasting the school-issue toothpaste in his mouth, and the faint taste that was _them_, shared and new from Fai's lips.

"Mine," Fai said, and Yuui nodded. His twin grinned - Yuui felt it against his lips - and said, happily, "Mine."

"Yeah," Yuui whispered. "Yeah, I'm yours, Fai. Now go back to bed before you get us caught, please? I'll still be yours when you wake up."

Fai snorted. "You'd better," he said, but he was slipping backward out of their bed, and once he was gone Yuui rolled over to bury his face in his pillow with a soft groan. Sparring tomorrow was going to be embarrassing. He just hoped Kazuhiko-sensei hadn't realized that his gangly, quiet, shy student was _crushing_on him or it would be awkward from all angles.

Perhaps encouraged by his whispered conversation with Fai, as he slid back toward sleep he found his thoughts turning to sex with his teacher. The thought made him uncomfortable. He liked Kazuhiko, that was becoming increasingly apparently, but what would he do if his teacher cornered him and - and _touched_him? He didn't think that would happen - his instructor was a brave man and a good man and had never displayed the slightest interest in Yuui in that manner, and he had a girlfriend, he'd showed the twins her picture - but if it did...

No, Yuui decided. He didn't want that. A crush didn't mean anything by itself, surely. It was just... expressing an interest, and apparently what he was interested in was dangerous, clever, strong men with wild dark hair who observed everything and said little and were nothing like, well, he and Fai. But having an interest didn't mean he could ever act on it.

For the first time, he felt a pang of regret at the thought, and it surprised him. He never wanted to lose Fai, not ever; Fai was his and had always been his and always would be. He'd never wanted anyone else instead, and he still didn't, but he felt that twinge of remorse regardless, the voice in the back of his mind that whispered _maybe you should find someone in your life who isn't one of you_, and it was new and strange and made him shiver all over.

He rolled over and tugged the pillow over his head, as if to drown it out. It didn't work.

_No_, he thought. _I can't have him and someone else. It doesn't work like that. _

Twenty years later, in an entirely different bed, Yuui opened his eyes and wished that it did.

* * *

><p>Half the red lights on Kurogane's display winked out as the <em>Primela<em> fell out of active missile range, too battered and crippled to continue the chase or the fight. Kurogane had scored a solid hit on the enemy ship's external radiator fins, and there was no way she could maintain combat speed without her internal reactor heating up enough to cook her crew alive. No, she was out of it now, but that still left her sibling ship hounding mercilessly up the Mokona's aft side.

He cursed the fact that _Primela_ had gotten in at least one hit on them in return, although it hadn't been a high enough priority for the damage reports to override his tactical display. Their enemies were using missile spread tactics that Kurogane had never seen before, although he was familiar with the general patterns - _Primela _ favored a concentrated burst pattern with a random-seed spread, the missile trails making almost beautiful abstract shapes in space as they closed on him. The random shape of the missile flight meant that his defenses couldn't predict where each of the missiles would come in, and it was impossible to stop them all.

But Syaoran had performed his usual miracles, flying the Mokona through a pattern as tight as the proverbial shuttle through the eye of a needle. It helped that although the exact details of the random-seed shuttle burst were different every time, the basic format was always the same. It was one of the standard combat doctrines employed by the Eurasian Federation military, and though the details were classified, enough combat data had leaked into the underworld for pirates and other independents to develop countermeasures for it.

And right now _Shogo _ was fucking up his screens with another classic Earth tactic; if you can't aim for shit, then flood the field with enough missiles that the sheer saturation overwhelmed your enemy's point defenses. Now that the _Primela_ had dropped back the _Shogo _ had felt free to open up their magazines without the risk of friendly fire, and all of Syaoran's fancy flying couldn't help them when there was literally nowhere clear of missiles to go. It was all up to Kurogane, and to the Mokona's countermeasures.

Syaoran kept them racing along away from their enemies at top acceleration, the engine teetering at the redline of maximum combat power. He could theoretically go faster, but not without tapping into the energy reserves Kurogane needed to keep on shooting. Kurogane kept all his attention locked on his tactical display, hands flying over the controls as he called up protocol after protocol to blast the closest missiles to cinders. Damn it, with all this chaff cluttering up his plot he couldn't _see_ to get a clear shot -

There! The moment flickered so fast as to be almost instantaneous, but it was the moment Kurogane had been waiting for, and a ferocious grin split his face as he slammed out the command to excute _tenma ku ryusen,_ the heaven-facing dragon spiral. His own missiles - the heaviest punch he had remaining in his arsenal - roared away to his stern in a winding spiral pattern that cut through the sea of straight-vectored missiles with contemptuous ease.

At this distance there was no way to clearly see the missiles hit, but he saw on his tactical plot how the _Shogo _ stuttered and slowed, strafing off course as it tried at the last moment to turn its vulnerable aspect away from Kurogane's fire. Several long, tense seconds passed - Kurogane, occupied with clearing away the last of his enemy's last missile wave, had no opportunity to fire again.

But then the readings on his plot abruptly dropped from red to orange, then to yellow, as the enemy ship's acceleration fell to nothing and their speed dropped to a crawl. He must have hit their thrusters after all - either that or scored a serious enough hit on their structural hull that the ship was forced to drop out of combat before the sheer stresses of accelerating madly through space ripped the ship apart.

Either way, there was no way they could continue their pursuit, and Kurogane blew out a long breath as he sat back in his chair, hands resting loose on the keyboard.

"We did it!" Syaoran's excited shout crackled over his suit's comm, and Kurogane shot a glower at the back of his pilot's helmet.

"Don't get cocky, kid," Kurogane growled back over the comm. "Keep accelerating. I want you to get us good and lost in deep space before they can either repair up to look for us or bring some other ships out in the field. Give yourself a time window of five hours before pursuit, and do your best."

Five hours was almost ridiculously pessimistic - there was no way that either of their pursuit ships were moving in less than twelve - but Kurogane didn't want to let out the possibility that more ships in Mars orbit had been Feds in disguise. "We've got three of the Feds' Most Wanted on board and half a ton of narcotics. Better safe than sorry."

"Yes, captain," Syaoran said obediently. "I'm switching the ship's priority system from combat mode to speed mode now."

"Do it," Kurogane grunted, and sat forward in his chair again as the damage report began to scroll up over his console. He couldn't be interrupted in combat, so all but the most absolutely top priority messages - say, a hull breach in the cockpit itself - had been shunted aside. Now they rolled up before him, a litany of minor malfunctions and near-misses, and - what the _hell…_

These readings made no sense. Mokona's environmental systems in the main torus were flagged a bright orange - one level down from the crimson that would indicate hard vacuum in a residential area. Atmospheric pressure and oxygen content were at 47% of normal, which ticked up to 48% even as he watched. But that shouldn't have been possible.

He knew they'd taken a hit somewhere on their midsection, but Mokona's hull integrity report was showing that the impact site had been sealed off. If the breach had been small enough for Mokona to seal it, then they should hardly have lost any air in the first place; if it was big enough to cause major pressure loss, then there was no way Mokona could have gotten it closed at all. Kurogane had been through space combat before and had always seen green or red, but never orange; what could have possibly happened to cause that?

Frowning, he keyed up the engine room on the ship's internal comm. "Engineer, give me a status report on the midsection hull breach," he said brusquely. He didn't bother to announce the results of the battle; Mokona's all-clear code made that obvious enough. There was no response, and Kurogane's frown deepened as irritation began to shade into alarm. "Sakura?"

He heard Syaoran's breath catch suddenly over their helmet, and that spurred him to action; he switched from the engine room's frequency to that of Sakura's suit helmet. "Sakura, what the hell's going on?"

"Captain!" the breathless response came back immediately, and Kurogane saw Syaoran breathe again.

"Why aren't you in the engine room?" He switched on the tracking feature for each of his crewmember's locating beacons, and his stomach went cold as he pinpointed her in the hallway outside of the infirmary. "Are you hurt?"

"Um… no," Sakura said, but there was far too much hesitation in her voice and the cold fist around his stomach turned to a titan's grip that was crushing the air out of his lungs because _Yuui hadn't been wearing a suit and he couldn't locate him on the map -_

"What happened?" Kurogane growled into the comm., and he wondered what his voice must sound like because the sound of Sakura's breathing on the other end actually stopped for a moment, and Syaoran lifted his head from the plot to look at him. "Where's the goddamn moron spoonbender and why the _fuck_ aren't the two of you in the engine room where it's safe?"

"He's… he's in the infirmary," Sakura said hesitantly. "We took a hit to the midsection while we were still on our way to the stores to get him a spare suit, and the hull was completely breached -"

The rest of whatever she was going to say got lost as Kurogane launched himself from his captain's chair and slammed into the cockpit hatch with a force that might have broken a bone if they weren't still in half-gravity. Mokona bleeped at him indignantly, reminding him that the atmospheric pressure in the corridor was still only at 49%, but he snarled and punched in his captain's override savagely. A savage gust of wind pushed him into the corridor, and he dropped with a heavy thump onto the plating and set off at a run through the thin air while the hatch re-sealed behind him.

He stopped dead as the hull breach came into sight before him; it sat on the inner curve of the ship's ceiling like a malevolent spiderweb, like a ragged bullseye painted in glowing neon green. The green was the selfheal, he knew, the busy work of billions of nanobots working to harden the seal around the wound; but the sheer _size _ of the breach made his balls want to shrink back into his body. He'd not seen a hit like that in… _years, not since…_ and he knew perfectly goddamn well that he'd been right the first time; there was _no_ way that Mokona should have been able to seal a hole that big.

"Captain!" Sakura's voice crackled over the radio as she swung into sight ahead of him, and skidded to a stop a meter away with her arms outflung. "It's all right! Yuui-san is okay. He managed to get the breach sealed before we lost all the atmosphere, and I took him to the infirmary and gave him oxygen and he's going to be fine -"

It was hard for Kurogane to tear his eyes away from the mesmerizing sight of that breach, _that breach, it was as big around as the circle of his arms, how could something so small make a hole that big? _ but the mention of Yuui's safety was hook enough to pull him out of it. "What," he said, and it came out much shakier than he wanted. He took a deep breath and swallowed, and managed to pack down the blazing fear and shock and grief of his memories. "What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, he got the breach sealed?"

"Oh, Captain Kurogane, it was incredible!" Sakura perked up at the telling of it, straightening up from her anxious half-crouch as she gushed at the memory. "You should have seen it! It was a bad hit, you could see right through the hole to the other side, the hull shards were everywhere - but Yuui-san went right up with it and he bent the pieces back into place with telekinesis!"

"He didn't have a goddamn suit on!" Kurogane said incredulously, the best he could think to say in response to such a thing. He'd known that Yuui was stronger than other kinetics, but this… was it even possible?

Well, obviously it was possible. But that didn't mean it wasn't also fucking _ridiculous. _

"I know," Sakura said, and a little of the exuberance faded from her voice; the anxiety was written on her face clear enough to see even through the tinted faceplate. "He - he collapsed right after, and I had to carry him to the infirmary. But he'll be fine. I gave him oxygen and a heat pad and Mokona gave him the injections. He'll be fine!" She looked up at Kurogane seriously. "He saved the ship, you know."

Kurogane knew. The pressure loss to the corridor wouldn't have been deadly by itself - _well, except to Yuui, who hadn't been wearing a suit - _ but the massive acceleration they'd been pulling to stay ahead of their pursuers absolutely depended on a sealed ship. With the structural integrity of the hull breached and the massive pressure differential between one layer of the ship and the next, the Mokona would have been slowly torn apart. Either that or they would have had to cut acceleration and drop speed, just like the enemy ships he'd battered into submission behind them, and then they all would have fallen into Federation hands.

But that hadn't happened; there was no point in dwelling on near misses. "So why are you out here and not in there with Superman?" he asked.

"He asked me to check on his brother for him," Sakura explained, glancing back the way she had come along the corridor. "In case his cabin had been hit, or lost pressure. I told him that the hatches sealed themselves automatically and were airtight, but he wouldn't listen." She hesitated. "I don't think he was all the way awake, to be honest. He was pretty hypothermic and confused."

Kurogane felt an icy ball of dread growing in his stomach, and tried to push it down. Hypoxia and chills were all too common hazards in a space going environment; as long as they were treated quickly, there should be no real long-term danger. But that knowledge failed to assuage the fear, so he tried to counter it with hot anger instead. "That idiot," he snarled. "If he'd had a damn vacuum suit…"

Much to his surprise his ship's engineer rounded on him with an angry scowl, fists planted on her hips. "Captain, you need to stop picking on Yuui-san!" she exclaimed sharply. "It's not his fault that he didn't have a suit to bring with him. And he saved the ship! He was really brave and really strong, and it's not right for you to yell at him over this!"

Kurogane blinked, taken aback by the uncharacteristic fierceness of her tone. His anger receded, to be replaced by guilt. "It's not like I was going to go in there and start chewing him out while he's sick," he muttered, ignoring the fact that this was pretty much exactly what he'd been planning to do.

"Sure you weren't," Sakura said skeptically. Then her cheeks reddened with embarrassment, and she scuffed her boots against the friction carpeting. "Captain, I understand that you're worried," she said in a softer tone. "And that you yell because you worry. But please, Yuui-san isn't feeling well right now and he doesn't need you making it worse. Promise me that you won't yell at him?"

Well, hell, how was he supposed to say no to that? If he didn't promise, it was as much as saying that he was going to ream their passenger's ass the next time he got him alone. "I promise," he said grudgingly. "Are you going back to the infirmary?"

Sakura hesitated, looking from one hatch to the other. "I was going to," she said. "I know I ought to check on the engine - energy burns always leave some damage in their wake, and it'll take a few hours to get the environmental systems synchronized again. But I don't think he should be alone right now…"

"You go check on the engines," Kurogane informed her brusquely. "I'll watch over the hero of the hour."

"Are you sure?" Sakura said anxiously. "If we're attacked again…"

Kurogane snorted and shook his head. "No way either of the guys we tangled with are in any shape to come after us again," he said. "And Syaoran is planning a course that will get us so lost in open space that it would take a fucking miracle for any other ships to spot us. Unless we run into aliens, there's not much for a gunner to do for the next month and a half except sit on my ass. Might as well do it in the infirmary as anywhere else."

"All right," Sakura said, still sounding dubious. With a little wave she changed course, heading for the nearest hatchway in the corridor that gave access to the engine room. Halfway down the ladder, she popped her head up again long enough to shout, "And remember, you promised! No yelling!"

Kurogane grumbled under his breath as he turned and made his way through the corridors to the infirmary. He could hear the ship's vents buzzing loudly as Mokona labored to restore the equilibrium in the main hatchway, but even with full priority restored to the environmental systems it would take hours.

He stopped by the guest cabin before he went to the infirmary - it seemed even smaller than usual with the triage crate taking up most of the floor. He stared for a long minute at the peacefully slumbering man in the box, thinking about how fucking _weird_ it was to see Yuui's by-now familiar face on someone else.

The infirmary was dark after the bright lights of the hallway and the bridge. Kurogane hesitated a moment, then undid the seals on his helmet and took it off, setting it on a shelf by the door. The heated air of the infirmary hit him in the face like a blow, and it took him a moment to adjust. After an endless hour locked in combat, adrenaline pouring into his systems as he struggled with the ship's guns to land a hit on his enemies while simultaneously managing the electronic defenses to keep the missiles from getting a lock on them… with his ears still full of screaming alarms and his vision filled with flashing streams of numbers and symbols and strobing lights, it was a little hard to shift gears.

As his eyes adjusted he was able to make out Yuui in one of the infirmary beds, one of the pea-green electric blankets pulled up over his chest. A plastic oxygen mask covered the lower half of his face, and an IV trailed from his left wrist; he looked still and far too pale, his light blond hair in a tangled mess on the pillow.

In this state he looked far too much like his sleeping brother, and Kurogane took a deep breath to try to steady himself against the rush of emotions that screamed in protest; Yuui shouldn't look like _this, _ thin and fragile and pale, limp and _quiet. _ The bastard should be up and bouncing around, calling Kurogane cheeky names and messing up his gallery with cake and laughter.

He wanted to either turn and walk right out again, or march over to the bed and grab Yuui and shake him by the collar while he demanded to know what the hell Yuui had been thinking… but he'd promised Sakura that he'd sit with him, and she'd probably have some way of finding out if he broke the 'no yelling' clause. So instead he blew out the deep breath he'd taken, and walked softly across the room to the bed. There was a cheap plastic folding chair hooked into the wall, and he pulled it free, shook it loose, and settled his weight into it with a dangerous creaking noise.

Yuui's eyes had been closed when Kurogane came in, but the shuffling of the chair must have disturbed him; he opened his eyes and rolled his head to the side to take in Kurogane's presence. His eyes were almost shockingly reddened, the whites shot through with burst capillaries; a common side effect of unprotected exposure to vacuum, Kurogane knew, but at least Yuui seemed to be focusing on him all right. Under the clear plastic mask, Yuui's lips moved in a faint smile.

"I told you, you don't have to smile all the time," Kurogane said gruffly. He hadn't been intending to disturb Yuui while he was asleep, but since he was awake, Kurogane took hold of his left hand and weighed it in his own palm. The idiot's hand was freezing cold, and Kurogane chafed it between his own in an effort to warm it.

Yuui's lips moved again; his free hand fumbled up to pull the oxygen mask away from his face so he could talk. "Is -" he said, then coughed. Kurogane reached up to reaffix the mask, but Yuui pulled it away determinedly. "I'm okay," he croaked. "Much better than before. Is Fai - is he okay?"

"He's fine," Kurogane assured him firmly. "Just fine. There wasn't any damage anywhere else in the ship." Kurogane hesitated, then said, "You protected him."

Yuui took a deep breath and blinked rapidly, and the light caught on salt clusters caught in his eyelashes - had he been crying earlier? Kurogane wondered with alarm. "I'm sorry," he said in a whisper. "Those ships - Syaoran said they were Fed bounty hunters. They must have been looking for me and Fai. I brought this down on us. I'm so sorry…"

"Shut up," Kurogane said sharply. "D'you think that we'd never had run-ins with the Feds before you two showed up? It's not exactly a safe life even without having a couple of runaway espers on board. They could just as easily have been coming after Sakura, and do you think I would just have handed _her _over to them?"

Once he'd gotten started, the words just kept on rolling out. "We have the guns there for a _reason,_ idiot, and just because we don't go looking for fights doesn't mean we can't handle ourselves just fine if we don't get in one. We don't _normally_ have to send people to the infirmary for being mouth-breathing idiots who go into combat without even a damn -"

His voice was rising, and he had to rein his temper back in with a pure effort of will. Sakura was right, he yelled because he was afraid; and he'd never been so afraid before because he'd never cared so much about losing someone before.

He cleared his throat, and found the readouts on the panel above Yuui's bed very interesting all of a sudden. "So," he said in a calm, neutral voice. "You're alive. 'S good. Fixing that breach in the hull… good work. Very good."

Yuui's hand tightened in his, and he looked down unwillingly to see Yuui smiling again, a faint sparkle in his bloodshot eyes. "Sakura-chan made you promise not to yell at me, didn't she," he said.

Kurogane snorted softy, and lifted one hand into a fist to punch very softly against the top of Yuui's head. "Idiot," he said, which he realized wasn't a _no, _but was the best he could do. "Take better care of yourself, will you? Your brother needs you, and… the rest of us have gotten used to having you around."

"I'm sorry," Yuui murmured, and Kurogane gave him a low-wattage version of his usual glare.

"What did I just say?" he demanded. "Don't apologize for shit that isn't your fault."

Yuui just smiled. "But it's nice to know that Captain Hardcore would miss me," he said.

"Don't be stupid. Of course I'd…" The words dried up in Kurogane's throat. Hell, what was he saying? He didn't even know any more. It was so much easier to show than to say.

On impulse, Kurogane leaned down towards the infirmary bed. He'd intended no more than a chaste kiss on the forehead, or maybe the cheek, but Yuui had other ideas. As soon as Kurogane was in range Yuui suddenly surged upwards from the bed, and his lips met Kurogane's with a resounding burst of heat.

Surprised, Kurogane almost pulled back. He'd promised himself that he wouldn't push himself on Yuui, that he wouldn't… what the hell was he thinking? _Yuui _was the one kissing _him_ here. So he relaxed into the kiss, his hand sliding around the back of Yuui's neck to support him as he opened his mouth, darting his tongue questingly against Yuui's lips.

Yuui made a small, breathy noise - of surprise, Kurogane thought - but responded in kind. He was _good_ at it, too; despite his lack of confidence in other areas, his kissing spoke of experience, and with the small part of his brain not focused on the heat of Yuui's mouth and the softness of his lips Kurogane wondered where he had learned it.

Eventually, though, they had to break off - in part because Kurogane's neck was killing him, leaning down at this awkward angle, and in part because an alarm was sounding in the medical panel as Yuui found himself gasping dangerously for breath again. "Idiot," Kurogane said - almost tenderly - as he picked up the oxygen mask and fixed it firmly on Yuui's face again.

Yuui just gave him a sheepish shrug and a smile. His left hand stayed in Kurogane's, though, and tightened anxiously when Kurogane shifted back in the plastic chair. _Don't go…?_ his eyes pleaded.

"I'm not going anywhere," Kurogane assured his unspoken question. "Those poor bastard feds are a hundred kilometers behind us for now, and I've got nowhere better to be all the way from here to Europa."

Yuui nodded, some of the anxiety unknotting from his face, and settled back against his pillow as he closed his eyes.

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><p><strong>-end part 2 - Mars -<strong>

to be continued.


	15. Part III: EUROPA

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Fai/Yuui, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Sakura/Syaoran  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapters will be posted both on my profile and also on her fic journal, which can be found at inmyvortex on Livejournal._

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><p><strong>Part III - EUROPA<br>**

_As the shockwave of human colonization spread out through the center of the solar system, the frantic rush for extraterrestrial real estate gradually slowed. Once all the inner-planet territory had been claimed, the colonial spirit waned. Apart from the bold Indian entrepreneurs who bought a few acres of the asteroid belt to convert into luxurious pleasure resorts - the ultimate getaway vacation - no one had much interest in the cold and distant reaches of the outer solar system. No planet besides Mars had any hope of terraforming, and if you were going to go to the trouble of building an entire space station to house your new population, most people preferred to avoid such a long commute._

_But where the lure of exploration and colonization failed, one incentive remained strong - money. Mankind's energy needs were vast in this nuclear age, and there simply were not enough heavy metals to fuel the fission reactors needed to fill that voracious need. Fissionable mines sprang up on the rocky, toxic satellites orbiting Sol's gas giants; Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and distant Triton soon sported outposts of their own. Much of the mining process was automated, but there was always a need for human brains and human hands._

_Few men, however impoverished, were eager to accept the cold and barren exile from the inner heart of the solar system. Even with the most advanced military technology, even when the planets were in perfect alignment, it was still over a two-month trip one way; for such passages as these men could afford, it could be four or even six months before they could see Earth again. _

_As desperate for labor as Earth was for energy, the private owners of the Jovian mines soon hit on an age-old solution; prison labor. Earth's prisons were claustrophobicly overcrowded, and the mine owners offered their inmates a deal: commute their sentence to Triton, provide the labor for the mines and have their years in prison reduced, and even get a little pay for that effort. For this there was no lack of volunteers; at last, a steady supply of labor enabled the miners to grow fantastically rich on the back of their work gangs._

_The social consequences of such a bargain were, perhaps, predictable. The outer colonies soon gained an infamous reputation for being the roughest, most lawless place still within reach of human civilization. The robber barons had little interest in maintaining law or order, only in keeping the goods flowing; they settled quickly into an amicable relationship with the shady underworld of a dozen different human nations, trading their precious goods for cargoes of drugs and slave labor. _

_Once they had served their sentences the workers were free to return to Earth, but in practice few did; many of them, had nothing to go back to, and the wild and lawless atmosphere of the miner colonies was almost as addictive as the drugs the robber barons took care to freely distribute. Few women lived on the outer colony, and even fewer children; those women who ended up there by chance or misfortune were close-knit and wary, striking their own deals to survive. _

_For the most part the peoples of Earth were perfectly content to keep it so; Jupiter was a long way away, far enough that the excesses of the miner colonies did not trouble them, and they were just as happy to see that their most violent criminals went there and never returned._

_But while your earth man-on-the-street might not care about the rampant corruption and disorder of a mining colony ten million kilometers away, there were some who did; those whose profits were most unhappily pinched by the peculation of the robber barons, whose sense of order most outraged by the rampant lawlessness of the colonies._

_The Ministry of Extraterrestrial Affairs - more colloquially known as the Ministry of Space - was an odd entity, a wildly lopsided conglomeration of different governing entities tangled into one. The Ministry of Space had first been created in the early days of Lunar colonization by the United Nations, a tiny department meant to regulate the then-tiny collection of scientific and commercial enterprises that represented all of Mankind's efforts in space. _

_But as human habitation of space expanded, so did the responsibilities and rights of the Ministry, until the Ministry of Extraterrestrial affairs was not only the largest bureau in the UN council, but in fact the largest coherent governing body remaining on Earth. It should have been broken down into smaller regulatory bodies decades before, but the power of the Ministers of Space - well supported by the vast amounts of wealth that poured through them from the Martian and Lunar and Jovian colonies - successfully resisted the change._

_Fei Wong Reed was but the latest in a long series of Ministers of Space who, in their own person, held more power in his office than any freely elected leader in the civilized world and commanded more wealth and military clout than any totalitarian despot. But unlike his predecessors who were content to rest on their laurels, Fei Wong Reed - a minor bureaucratic official in the Ministry's emergency response forensic department until he managed to buy and bribe his way into a position of power - showed a vast and energetic ambition. Not content with his control over the near-Earth space lanes and Lunar construction facilities, he sought to reassert Earth dominance over the now-independent planetary nation of Mars - and over the prodigal Jovian mining colonies._

_It is not to be underestimated the extent of the power that the Ministry of Space could wield; unlike almost any other government body they had no regulations, no external oversight. They commanded almost exclusive control over the elite psionic commando forces trained and graduated from the Academy, and enough money from space tariff and taxes to build a navy that dwarfed any sovereign nation._

_All of Fei Wong Reed's wealth and power, however, could not overcome the sheer handicap posed by the vast gulf yawning between Earth and Jupiter. At a gap of nearly ten million miles and two to three month's lag time in effective response, the martial law he sought to enforce on the Jupiter colonies was nearly impossible to enforce. Every worker's riot, every sly underhanded move on the part of the robber barons demanded a response that would take billions of yenbucks and months of preparation time to launch. _

_The result has been an uneven, unofficial war raging back and forth over the middle solar system for almost a decade. Despite the handicaps he faces, the vast income offered by the Jovian mines as well as the Minister's own wrathful pride will not allow him to give in; and it is difficult to gauge the lengths to which he would go to find a solution that will allow him to realize his dreams of conquest._

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><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	16. 13: i want but have none

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah** and... you know what, I don't even know who wrote most of this chapter, we both wrote a lot of it._

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><p>The cockpit was empty but not silent, what with the hum of the computers and the fans and Syaoran's fingers drumming out a pattern on the keys. He could have put on a film or some music, which was what he did most of the time when Sakura was too busy to keep him company and the captain was busy in his own room, but he preferred to write without distractions. The only sound was Mokona's voice, patiently correcting his grammar and syntax errors before he had time to go edit them out himself. He supposed he could have muted her, but he disliked treating her poorly, and so he said nothing as he carefully typed:<p>

_Dear Kimihiro, _

No, that sounded too formal. He frowned at the email header and then deleted it and replaced it with _Watanuki_, his pet name for his twin.

_We are still flying toward Jupiter. Thank you very muuch for the cake recipe_.

"Unknown word detected. Suggested replacement: 'much'," said Mokona.

"Thank you, Mokona-chan," Syaoran replied politely, having already corrected it while she was talking. He bit at his lower lip and squinted at the screen again. _It has now been two weeks since the incident of which I wrote you last. Our guest has been relocated from his temporary quarters to the Rec Room by the Captain, who claims it is because he is taking up space someone might need. I suspect he is not being wholly honest, but our guest seems to not mind. He is still not fully recovered and is convalescing on the couch. Your recipe was most appreciated as he says cooking gives him something to do that does not require alot of focus_- ~

"'Alot' detected. Suggested replacement: a lot. Two words," said Mokona.

Syaoran nodded absently, correcting the error, and added, _the Princess and I have been keeping an eye out for him as best we can, although all we seem to be able to do for him is fetch him sweets he has already made himself! He is getting better steadily, though. The Captain says he isn't allowed to bring our other guest up out of his hibernation, as it were, until he is fully recovered._

_I saw your complaint about Shizuka in your last email and would like to remind you that Shizuka ate my cooking and complimented me on it before I left home. I'm not sure I'm wholly unbiased here. The Princess said to tell you that you're too harsh on Shizuka and to give her love to Himiwari-chan, which I am sure you will have no problems doing._

_Regarding your last point: I don't know when we'll be home. I'm sorry I didn't stop by during our recent trip downside, but considering the company I was keeping I didn't want to trouble the family. Tell mother and father I love them, and the Princess asked me to ask you to drop an email to her family friend 'Yuki'. The usual code, she says_.

"Grammatical error: 'The usual code, she says' is a sentence fragment. Perhaps you would like to revise it?" Mokona offered, and Syaoran sighed.

"No thank you," he said, keeping his tone courteous as his mother had scared into him, "I'll ignore it this once."

He stared at the screen, trying to remember if there had been anything else worth putting in. He couldn't think of anything. Sakura-chan had _held his hand_two days ago, but he didn't want to tell Watanuki that because he could just imagine his brother's reaction. Perhaps some shipboard gossip? There had been precious little of that since the incident. Well. Except for the big thing.

_I know how eager you are for shipboard gossip, _ he wrote, _and it seems my suspicions_

No, that wouldn't do. He frowned and deleted the paragraph.

_Our guest and the Captain may be up to_

No, not that either. Frustrated, he simply added, _on a lighter note, the Captain and our guest seem to have become very good friends already. More than you would think._

After a pause, he underlined and bolded the 'more' for emphasis. Watanuki would pick it up. Or he wouldn't, either way. He signed the letter with his name and gave it a quick once-over, before rolling up the keypad and picking up his mug of fruit juice. "Mokona, encrypt and send," he said, and the screen shivered as Mokona ran the email through his custom code program and then mailed it.

Not for the first time, he reflected on how lucky he had been that Earth had never seen his face that night he'd rescued Sakura from them. His family were unmonitored, and through them he had a link home. Sakura didn't; when Earth had announced her demise after her rescue she'd forbidden him from telling her family, and though she wouldn't tell him whether or not one of her visions had been behind the order he suspected it had. She was still uncomfortable talking about them, and that made him sad.

Time would lessen that. She'd told him Yuui-san wanted to teach her more about her gift, and for alone Syaoran appreciated the older man. He was proving to be a good friend to Sakura, someone older and wiser she could talk to when she couldn't even talk to him, and Syaoran was happy for her. It could get awfully lonely on this ship sometimes.

"Mokona, I'm going to the rec room to get something to drink," he said. "Please tell Captain Kurogane on my behalf. And make sure you forward all danger alerts to his cabin first."

"Affirmative," she replied as he stood up from the narrow pilot's chair, wincing. Even in low gravity his behind ached. Maybe he'd put in some time on the treadmill when he was down in the rec room.

The ship's corridors were empty and silent when he made his way down, which didn't surprise him. Sakura was busy in the engine room doing something complicated to the steerage, and she had made it gently but firmly plain that she didn't want to be distracted. He was so proud of her for that. Neither of them had known more than the basics of piloting or engine maintenance when they'd more or less turned up on the Captain's feet, and both of them had learned as much as they could from Kurogane and taught themselves from manuals and pirated university textbooks when they'd surpassed his knowledge, determined to be useful.

The rec room door opened quietly at his touch on the keypad, and he made his way in with a conscious effort to keep his footsteps quiet. Good thing, too: Yuui was passed out on the sofa, curled up under one of the green self-warming infirmary blankets. He was using the arm of the couch for a pillow, and his mouth was hanging open. He was even snoring lightly, which made Syaoran smile despite himself as he tiptoed carefully past Yuui to the galley.

He filled up his cup and drained it, and then filled it up again as he contemplated the exercise equipment. There was no way he could climb on one of those without waking Yuui up, he thought, ruefully, and decided he'd come back just before dinner. The Captain would be putting in his time soon anyway. Instead, he opted to stretch the cramp out of his legs by wandering in circles across the galley floor, his hands on his hips. He must have woke Yuui up, because his tousled blond haired appeared over the back of the sofa and stared at him in confusion through blurry blue eyes.

"Syaoran?" Yuui said, muzzily. "What are you doing?"

"I didn't mean to wake you, Yuui-san," Syaoran said. "I'm just stretching my legs."

"Oh." Yuui seemed to be considering this. "It's okay, you didn't wake me. I was hungry." He yawned hugely, and Syaoran smiled.

"Is there anything I can get you?" he asked. "We still have some of the brownies you made."

"Some of those would be fine," said Yuui, and gave him a sleepy smile. "Thank you."

"It's no problem," Syaoran reassured him as he dug around in the cupboard for the little box of brownies. Yuui had baked them during their orbit of Mars, after they'd returned from shopping but before he'd gone to see the triads, and it was a good thing he'd made hundreds because they were disappearing at an alarming speed. The captain eschewed them noisily, but Syaoran had observed the quiet, pleased look on his face when he tried the tiramasu Yuui had made him.

Speak of the devil, a few minutes later the Captain himself came into the galley. He was dressed in his workout clothes, and Syaoran sighed in disappointment as he said good-bye to any hope of getting a chance at the exercise equipment today.

He would have to be blind to miss the way Yuui brightened up in the captain's presence, or the way Kurogane's eyes lingered just a little too long on the other man in his habitual sweep of the room.

Kurogane tossed his hand towel over his neck, strode over to the couch and stood there looking down with a thoughtful frown, hands on his hips. "Good to see you're behaving yourself," he grumbled, which Syaoran and Yuui both translated as Captain-speak for _You're looking better._

Yuui beamed a smile up at him. "Everyone has been taking such very good care of me," he said. "Even though I feel silly, lazing about like a slug while everybody else is working!"

Kurogane snorted. "Don't be an idiot. What exactly else would you be doing?" he said. "We've got at least another three months in flight before we get anywhere near Jupiter, so it's not like there's any hurry."

Yuui frowned and fidgeted. "I don't understand why I'm so out of it. It's not like I was even injured," he objected. "I could have… Fai could already be awake by now."

"Yuui-san, hard vacuum is nothing to play around with," Syaoran objected seriously. "It's very hard on your throat and lungs. Even if there were no viruses involved, it's still as much trauma to your lungs as a bout of pneumonia. You really do need to take it easy."

"And if you ignore common sense and try to prance around like your usual dumbass self, you'll just make it take even longer," Kurogane dictated to him. "So sit down, shut up, and take your medicine."

Yuui sighed. "I just wish I could take a bath," he complained. "All this coughing makes me ache, but the little cupboard of a shower just doesn't do very much to help."

Syaoran could sympathize with the aches, if not the bath; his family hadn't been able to afford a luxury like a bathtub in the tiny Martian town where he'd grown up, so he'd never really seen what the appeal was supposed to be. Much to his surprise, though, Kurogane cleared his throat. "As a matter of fact, I have a bath… a small one, anyway… in my quarters," he said. "It's Japanese-style, not Western; there's not enough room to stretch out, but you can at least sit down in hot water."

Syaoran whipped around to gawk at his captain; Kurogane was normally incredibly private and defensive about his personal space. He and Sakura had been on the ship for three years and never been inside Kurogane's personal quarters, and now he was actually offering Yuui-san…?

"You mean it?" Yuui looked touched and embarrassed, enough that the hint of a blush rose to his cheeks. Then he covered it up with another smile, batting his eyelashes exaggeratedly at Kurogane. "Well, then, how could I turn down an invitation from such a handsome stud into his bed - er, bathroom? Of course, I'll need your help to make sure I don't fall in and drown…"

"Hn." Kurogane looked to the side, fiddling with the settings on the weight machine, but despite his darker skin, there was an unmistakable flush to the back of his neck. "I suppose I'd better, just to make sure you don't drop the soap, slip on the tiles and break your neck."

Drop the - good god, could they at least _pretend_ to be discreet? Syaoran choked, and Kurogane looked over at him with a glower. "What are you still doing here?" he demanded. "If you wanted to use the exercise equipment, too bad. They're mine for the next hour or so."

"No, thanks," Syaoran said hastily, reaching for his cup and another of the brownies. "As a matter of fact, I was just going somewhere else. Anywhere else."

"Oh, Syaoran," Yuui called out as he headed for the door. "Could you ask Sakura to come up, please? I wanted to start her lessons today, and I might as well make use of the time while Captain Sweaty is… occupied."

"I'll tell her," Syaoran yelled back hastily, and swung his way down the ladder into the corridor shaking his head. His next letter to Watanuki was going to be difficult to write; even if he told his twin about half this, he knew Watanuki would never believe him.

* * *

><p>Sakura was up to her armpits in the guts of the engine, both hands full and a flashlight clenched between her teeth, when she heard boots on the ladder. "Don't touch anything," she ordered, somewhat muffled around the obstruction. "It's that way for a reason!"<p>

"... What?"

Oh, she knew that voice. Hastily she jerked out of the open hatchway and spat the flashlight into the palm of one of her rough workgloves; Syaoran was floating with his hand on the bottom run of the ladder looking at her oddly.

"I had to pull the wiring out," she said. "There's a coolant leak somewhere in here, and I -" An idea struck. "Um, actually, maybe you could hold this for me?"

"Of course, princess," he said, and carefully pushed off the ladder, accepting the flashlight when she held it out to him. He clipped himself into position on the crosshatched railings marching across the engine casing and curled his fingers around the edge of the hatch, shining the light inside; relieved, Sakura bent forward to resume poking at its innards.

"Mokona said she was running half a degree hotter than normal about an hour ago. With the amount of stress she's put on her parts lately, I suppose it was just a matter of time before something broke," she said, and Syaoran nodded.

"We need to replace some bits when we stop at Europa, if we can," he said. "I don't know where we're going next."

Sakura bit her lip. She'd had dreams, vague and unhelpful, of herself in the shuttle... but she wouldn't be leaving the ship at the outer colonies - too dangerous by far - which meant they must be going planet-side again at _some_point, but no more details had been forthcoming. She hated how useless her gift was, sometimes.

Syaoran was frowning at her, and hastily she reached for something to change the topic. Syaoran was so very kind, she hated burdening him anything more than she had to. "Did you come from the cockpit, Syaoran-kun?" she asked, instead.

"No, I was in the galley getting a snack. Yuui-san said he wants you to go see him, when you can, for your training?"

"Oh!" said Sakura, and smiled. She'd been looking forward to those. Yuui wasn't a precog like her, but he had attended their classes, and he was no doubt the closest thing to a real instructor she was going to get. If anyone could help train her gift to be more handy, he could. "Well, I'm just about finished here."

"Are you sure?" Syaoran said.

"Yeah." Sakura stripped off her protective goggles and gloves, stowing them haphazardly in one of the many null-gee pockets around the engine room, and stretched her back to try to relieve the stiffness of working in null-gee for so long. "No time like the present, right?"

She took hold of the ladder leading out of the engine room and then hesitated, struck by a sudden doubt. She'd never talked with a _real_ psionic at length before; what if Yuui told her that she was no good, her talent was too weak, and she just didn't have what it took to master it? Yuui-san was kind, he wouldn't put it in those words - but that wouldn't change the reality of it, would it?

"Princess," Syaoran called out, and Sakura turned towards him quickly. He pushed himself lightly off the engine wall, floating towards her. His brown eyes were serious and earnest - those eyes she'd always loved - and he reached out to capture both her hands, grubby and sweaty from the work. A slight pressure braked him to a stop, and he hung there in midair with no anchor points except for her.

"I believe in you," he told her with absolute conviction. "Whatever this training takes, you'll master it. You're going to be the most amazing precog ever."

Sakura's cheeks flamed, and she ducked her face away. She let go of her own handhold to give him a matching two-handed grip, the two of them just floating in space for a moment, with eyes for no one but each other.

Then she broke the contact and twisted away, grabbing the nearest handhold and towed Syaoran to it. "I'd better not keep him waiting," she said breathlessly, and pulled herself rapidly up out of the hatch into ship's gravity.

Yuui was resting on the couch in the rec room when she went in, and she felt an almost motherly spike of worry for him. For all that he was a good three decimeters taller than her he looked almost fragile sprawled out on the couch. The captain was there too, working out on the exercise machines on the highest settings; Sakura gave him a side glance, wondering how she was going to manage to do this with him listening in.

Yuui looked up at her and smiled when he saw her, and she smiled back.

"Ready for your first lesson now?" he said.

"Yes," Sakura replied, and tried not to let her nervousness show through.

"Come and sit down, get comfortable," Yuui said, patting the empty couch cushion opposite him. Sakura sat, her back stiff and hands clenched tightly in her lap.

The weight bar banged down on the stack, and Yuui looked up with a frown creasing his lips. "I don't think we need an audience for this lesson, Captain Sweaty," he said, and Sakura gaped at Yuui; neither she nor Syaoran would ever have dared to talk to the captain like that. "Don't you have anything else to do, any more old B-grade films to go watch?"

"It's my ship. Go have your lesson somewhere else," Kurogane objected, but Yuui just smiled with an odd hard edge to it.

"But _you_ told me to stay in the rec room couch and not move around too much," he said sweetly. "Unless _you_ were the one who wanted to be on the couch?"

Kurogane looked at him for a long moment, taking a deep breath as though to explode; then he let it out all at once, and shook his head in disgust as he sat up from the work bench. "I'm going to work out _in peace,_ in my _quarters,_" he announced, as though it had been his idea the whole time, and stalked out.

"There's no need to be anxious, Sakura-chan," Yuui assured her, and Sakura flushed despite herself, her skin feeling hot and cold at once. "This isn't a test; there are no wrong answers. I'm not exactly an expert on precognitive visions myself, you know; you'll be teaching me as much as I'm teaching you."

Sakura blew out her breath. "Okay," she said, and gave him a firm nod. "What do you want me to do? I can't… I mean, I don't think I can make a vision just come…"

"We aren't going to worry about that right now," Yuui assured her. "We'll start with the ones you've already had. When was the last time you had a vision?"

"You mean, the last one I can remember clearly?" Sakura asked. "I had one earlier this morning, but it went by so fast that I hardly remember it. Before that, there was one yesterday that was a little bit longer and clearer - it wasn't an important one, though."

"It doesn't need to be important, just one that you remember clearly." Yuui said with a nod. "All right, close your eyes. I want you to think back on that vision. Don't try to do anything else yet, just bring it to your mind."

Obediently, Sakura closed her eyes and tried to recall the vision from yesterday. "Okay," she said.

"Keep your eyes closed, try to keep yourself in the vision as much as possible," Yuui advised her. "I'm going to ask a few questions, and I want you to answer them as best you can.

"In the vision, where are you?"

"Here," Sakura said. "In the Mokona's gallery, I mean."

"How do you know that?"

"What?" Confused, Sakura opened her eyes to stare at Yuui. "I - I mean, it just is. I recognize it."

"What things do you recognize, exactly?" Yuui said patiently. "Don't just leap to conclusions. Tell me what you actually see, in the vision. Keep your eyes closed."

Frowning, Sakura did as she was told; she tried to call the vision back to her, focusing on the little details. "It's the same room - I mean, the walls are the same color," she said, "and the same shape, and the gallery is over in a corner and the exercise machines are by the wall. There's the panel where the vid screen and libraries are kept, although they're closed."

"Focus on the kitchen area. Do you see anything there?"

Sakura concentrated on the vision. "Yes," Sakura said, somewhat to her own surprise. "There's a - there's a bin on the counter that I've never seen before, although I can't see what's in it."

"Can you see anything on the walls? Clocks, calendars, posters, anything like that?"

"No," Sakura said. "But, I mean, there isn't anything on the walls, is there?"

"There isn't anything on the walls _now," _ Yuui corrected her. "Don't jump to conclusions. Don't assume that just because something looks familiar, you know everything about it. Things may have changed. What else do you see?"

"All right," Sakura said. She squinted her eyes closed again, so hard her cheeks scrunched up with the effort, but after a moment blinked them open again. "I can't really tell anything else," she said apologetically. "It was yesterday, it's already begun to fade."

"That's all right," Yuui said reassuringly. "From now on, when you have a vision, try to get as many details as possible. Do you write your visions down?"

"Sometimes," Sakura said. "Only the important ones."

"Starting from today, I want you to write all of your visions down, no matter how unimportant they seem," Yuui instructed her. "Little details, even if they seem trivial at the time, all add up to give you the most complete picture as possible."

"Okay," Sakura said, a little daunted by the scope of the task. "But, Yuui-san, I don't think you understand. When I say they're not important, I mean - they're _really_ not important. Most of the things I see are just - just little flashes of me on a normal day, except it's a _different _day. Working on the engine, walking through the corridors, washing my hands - there's nothing about them that makes them different from any other day. It's not like - it's maybe only one time in ten, maybe less, that I see something that's at all unusual."

She felt ashamed, admitting that; she always wished her power was more _useful,_ that it would show her things that actually _mattered_ instead of just peppering her with mundane details all out of the wrong timeline. When her gift had first started to manifest itself, at first Sakura hadn't even understood that she was seeing visions out of the future at all; she would flash forward to dinner, or going to pick up the mail, and then just shake off the dizziness and move on. It had been months before she started to make the connection, to realize that she was 'remembering' things that hadn't even _happened_ yet.

Until the visions started to change. Until she started seeing flashes of herself - not in her familiar family home but in strange places, with strange people, not her family and friends at all. She kept seeing herself in the back of a darkened van, in a tiny room with blank walls, in a whitewashed corridor with glaring lights. She saw strangers, tall and uniformed and hard-faced, and heard her own voice crying.

Sakura had spent weeks in a terrified fog of uncertainty, not knowing if the visions were real or nightmare, afraid of something that was _going_ to happen but not knowing _when. _She'd been afraid to tell her family, afraid they would think her crazy if it wasn't true, afraid they would be put in danger if it was. The only one she'd dared to tell had been Syaoran, and he had believed her immediately; without his strong and steady support, Sakura thought she really would have gone crazy. And if he hadn't come to rescue her…

"Sakura-chan," Yuui said, and something touched her elbow gently; Sakura realized she'd drawn into a tight miserable huddle on the couch, and straightened up to look at her new teacher. He was smiling encouragingly at her, and Sakura gave him a shaky smile back.

"Believe it or not, that's actually perfectly normal for precognitives," Yuui told her encouragingly. "At least when they're starting out. Some older precogs, who have had decades of practice to master their powers, claim to be able to direct their visions; but for most of them, it happens at completely random times."

Sakura frowned. "I always thought that was why precogs went to the academy, to learn how to control their power so they don't see useless stuff," she said. "So they can get stronger."

Yuui laughed. "No, not really," he said. "_Strong_ or _weak_ when we're talking about precognitive ability only refers to how _far_ into the future they can see, and how long they can maintain a vision once they've had it. We'll have to do a little more work before we can determine how strong you are, but believe me, it's nothing to feel ashamed about. A stronger power is actually harder to control and interpret, because the range of things you see is so much wider; it could be tomorrow, or six months from now, or even six years. If you know for sure that what you're seeing can only occur in the next few months, that makes it much easier to narrow it down to when it is."

"But how can I figure out when a vision is?" Sakura said, frustrated and mystified.

"There are two ways to find that out," Yuui said. "First of all, keep a comprehensive log of _all_ of your visions, no matter how minor. That way when the moment of the vision occurs, you can match it up with your entry in the log, and get a sense of your range that way. The other way is using signal systems."

"What do you mean?" Sakura asked.

Yuui waved at the walls around them. "Remember how I asked whether you saw posters or calendars on the walls?" he said. "Most precogs develop a system of things they can control in their environment, which they can use to orient themselves inside a vision and nail down the time it takes place."

Sakura stared at him. "You mean, like putting a calendar in every room?" What a simple concept! Why had that never occurred to her before? With every computer console on the ship set to display the time and date, most people had gotten out of the habit of putting up a separate physical calendar that they would have to update manually - but the idea made perfect sense now that he had suggested it to her.

"That's a start," Yuui replied, "but you don't always know that you're going to be in one of those rooms, now do you? There's a time and date display on every wall at the psionic academy for just that reason, but the precogs develop their own systems. They have certain clothes they wear on certain days of the week, or certain ways of doing their hair - I know one girl who changed her nail polish every day, so that she could always tell what day of the week it was by looking at her hands."

Sakura couldn't help it; she burst into giggles. "I don't think I'd want to do that," she said, "it would be way too much trouble to change it every day."

Yuui chuckled along with her. "You can try different things, to see what works best for you," he said. "Now, when you go to write down a vision, you should always include what they call the five big W's. _When_ does the vision take place - and we just covered how you would know that. _Where_ is the vision - if it's some place you don't know, then describe it in as much detail as possible. _Who _is in the vision with you, and _what_ is going on. Got that so far?"

"I think so." Sakura nodded slowly.

"Let's try it on your vision from yesterday. We know _where_ it was - the Mokona's rec room. We don't know when it was, so let's leave that for later. So the next step is, who was in the vision with you, and what happened?"

"Syaoran was the other person in the vision," Sakura said promptly. "As for _what_ was happening - well, I don't really know. We were laughing about something - we were both laughing almost too hard to talk. We had…" She had to close her eyes again for a moment to recall the vision, and when she did she almost jumped off the couch in surprise. "We had a bottle of something!"

"Oh, really?" Yuui's eyebrows rose in surprise, and his voice was dry. "Is this something that the Captain needs to hear about?"

Sakura flushed. "The Martian drinking age is fifteen!" she argued. "We're both of age."

"Sometimes I really have to wonder about you Martians," Yuui said in a voice of mock reproof. "All right, so you and Syaoran were having a party, and apparently laughing yourselves silly. Did anything else happen?"

"I don't know. It wasn't very long - less than a minute." Sakura paused as a detail that had almost disappeared from her memory resurfaced. "In the last few seconds - just before I lose it - the door opened and you came in. You were laughing, too."

"I was there?" Yuui's laughing eyes seemed to dim, his smile to fade a bit. "It can't have been too far in the future, then."

"What?" Sakura frowned at him. "Why do you say that?"

He shook his head, smiling. "Nothing, Sakura-chan," he said.

Sakura thought back over their lesson. "You said there were five big W's, but you only mentioned four," she said slowly. "Where, when, who, and what. What's the last one?"

"Ah," Yuui sighed. "That one's a little tricky, and I'm not sure we can get to it in the first lesson. The fifth W is actually 'how.' Don't ask me why they decided it begins with a W, when it doesn't."

"How?" Sakura asked curiously. "What do they mean, how?"

"How as in, how does the vision feel to you," Yuui explained. "I said it was tricky, and I don't think it's something that I ever fully understood, since I'm not a precognitive myself. The best way I can explain it is that all the precogs I know have said that their visions have a 'feeling' to them, either good or bad. I know it's extremely vague, and not very helpful to -"

"No," Sakura said, thinking back on her memories of her own visions. "I think I know what they mean."

Although she'd never tried to put a color or a sensation to it, she'd always relied on her 'feelings' about what she saw to tell whether any given future was good or bad. Syaoran and Kurogane had come to rely on it too, and always listened to her when she had any 'bad feelings.'

"You do?" Yuui brightened. "Well, that's a relief, because I don't really know how else to explain it. Like with the signal systems, each precog has their own way of thinking about these 'feelings,' but they're encouraged to develop a system, or a scale between two extremes, to codify those 'feelings.' Some people find it easiest to think of the visions like 'hot' and 'cold,' and others describe in terms of an aura of colors. In the classes they encourage you to think of it like a traffic light - green for 'go,' red for 'stop,' and so on. The instructors say that the more you concentrate on being able to recognize and classify these feelings, the more you'll be able to recognize them."

Sakura frowned, absently rubbing her forehead with one hand as she tried to add this new concept to the stack of new ideas Yuui had given her this session. "There's a lot to learn," she said, half complaining, half apologizing.

"Well, tell you what," Yuui said. "I think that's quite enough for the first lesson. Captain Puppy says that we have quite a while to go before we reach Jupiter…"

Sakura nodded. "At this time of year, normally we could do it in three months," she said. "But because we burned so much fuel during the battle, we have to go slowly to make up for it."

"Then we have plenty of time to continue the lessons along the way," Yuui said. "For now, your homework is to start keeping a log of all of your visions, and to come up with some systems for the 'when' and the 'how' of the vision. You don't necessarily have to use the examples I gave you - it should be something that makes sense to _you. _In the meantime, I'll talk with Syaoran about putting up some calendars."

"You don't think the Captain will mind, do you?" Sakura said anxiously. Although they could do what they liked in their private quarters, Kurogane had always put his foot down when it came to decorating the public spaces.

Yuui smiled, and his blue eyes glinted. "If he does, then I'll talk to him as well," he said. "I'm sure I can get him to come around."

"I hope so." Privately, Sakura was sure that he would. It was easy to forget sometimes that Yuui-san had only been on the ship with them for a few weeks; sometimes it seemed like he had been there for years. Especially with how close he and Captain Kurogane had gotten; she'd never seen Kurogane take to anyone so quickly and so well.

But then, she thought, Yuui-san was really very charming.

* * *

><p>It just highlighted the injustice of the world they lived in, Yuui thought, when he couldn't even cook dinner without the sharp steam from the stove sending his chest into painful seizures.<p>

All throughout dinner he'd had to periodically go sit down on the couch until he was able to suppress the coughs, directing Sakura (but definitely not Syaoran) to tend the dishes for him. They fell easily into the role of mentor and student, and it made Yuui feel odd to have someone looking up to him as though he were actually a competant adult. As though he actually knew enough to teach anyone anything.

He hadn't opted for anything complex. Sakura was learning fast, but he wasn't certain he could leave some of his recipes in her hands, especially since she had an unfortunate tendency to start reading engineering manuals instead of watching over delicately boiling concoctions, and so he was making two dishes at the same time, seafood for the captain and something actually edible for himself and the kids. He still loved cooking, the simple act of preparing things that people could enjoy, and unlike most teenagers Syaoran and Sakura were both happy to lend a hand with the clean-up afterward.

Still, it was sobering to realize that very soon now he likely wouldn't have time to prepare a full meal. Fai would be awake before long. The captain hadn't let him thaw out his twin while he was still sick - he'd said Yuui needed to be fully healed, and Yuui knew he was thinking of Fai's addictions because he hadn't told Kurogane what Fai's mental state had been like those few hours they'd had together before he'd put his brother to sleep.

Truth be told, he didn't really want to dwell on that much himself.

They had the drugs now, and he had consulted Mokona's medical unit about dosage and frequency. She had helped him run the tox screen that had identified the substances, and her databanks far surpassed his pathetic knowledge. He'd taken combat medic courses at the academy, of course, but they only covered basic triage; how to close wounds, administer an injection, splint broken limbs. He had been sort of interested in going into proper military medic training after they graduated, and then he'd outed himself and the psionic academy had happened instead.

He sighed heavily and turned his chin away from the galley. The rec room was filling up slowly with the horrifying scent of _fish_, the air filters running at lower power since the fight. He hoped the Captain liked his meal, because if he didn't Yuui would quite happily never touch the stuff again.

"Yuui-san?" Sakura had materialized at his elbow, wearing an anxious look. "There's a skin forming on the sauce, is that bad?"

"It means you need to turn the heat down," Yuui said, and climbed slowly to his feet, following her back to the galley. He showed her how to remove the skin and to thin the sauce, which had thickened too much; her green eyes followed everything he did and she wore a determined expression.

"Do you think I could show Syaoran-kun how to do this?" she said. "I'm sure he could be a better cook if he practiced..."

Yuui bit back his instinctive denial, and gave her a reassuring smile. "Maybe," he said encouragingly. "I'm not going to have much time for cooking soon, I'll be busy with Fai."

"Oh," she said, and frowned; Yuui raised her eyebrows in surprise.

"What is it, Sakura-chan?"

"Nothing," she said, and gave him a quick smile before shaking her head and pressing on. "It's just - we've never eaten so well as we have since you started cooking for us. Won't your brother let you keep on cooking?"

There was a plaintive note to her voice, and Yuui sighed. He didn't really want to tell her that it wasn't so much a matter of Fai 'letting' him cook as Fai needing to be around him all the time, and he could hardly juggle Fai if he had been... the way he was in a kitchen surrounded by sharp objects and heat sources.

"I don't think I can, Sakura-chan," he said, gently. "He's going to be quite sick when he wakes up. Earth was... not kind to him."

"I'm sorry," she said, turning pink. "That was selfish of me, I'm so sorry," and she might have kept on apologizing if he hadn't wordlessly leaned over and gathered her into an embrace. She hugged him back tightly, and he felt his throat closing as he realised this was the first hug he had had since Fai had been stolen from him. Kurogane might be okay with kissing, but embracing like this was so far off the table it was an impossibility.

He didn't let her go until the microwave oven bleeped at them, and then it was rather a mad dash to get plates assembled. Syaoran trooped in as they were putting out serving bowls, and his whole face lit up at the spread.

"Is the Captain not with you?" Yuui asked, confused, and the boy shook his head as he took his seat.

"He wasn't in the bridge," he said. "That looks amazing, Sakura-chan."

She blushed deeply. "Thank you," she said, with a bright smile. "Yuui-san did most of the work though..."

"But not all," Yuui finished for her smoothly, and was just wondering whether or not to have Mokona page Kurogane when the door hissed open and the man himself came in, clearly freshly showered and dressed in one of his old-fashioned Japanese-style garments.

"Huh," he said, looking over at the counter. His nostrils flared subtlety as he inhaled. "That tuna?"

Yuui nodded. "It's for you," he said, and found a hint of shyness in his voice. Embarassed, he tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and covered up for it by sliding into his seat, next to Sakura. Kurogane took his chair at the head of the table and accepted the chopsticks Syaoran passed him, his eyes narrowed and a quirk to his mouth that spoke of his good humour, and Yuui wondered just when he had become so adept at reading the minute changes in Kurogane's stoic counterance.

"Did you watch that film after all, Captain?" Syaoran inquired politely as they tucked in, and Kurogane grunted.

"I got about halfway through. You were right, the plot went downhill."

"What film is this?" Yuui asked, and Kurogane snorted, picking at the steaming chunks of tuna delicately.

"A Martian film, _Tokyo Falling_. It's about that deep space colony that fell apart."

"I heard it was really good," Sakura interjected. "They said it was very well researched."

"I've heard of that colony," said Yuui. "The terraforming went bad, didn't it?"

"So they say," said Syaoran darkly, and Yuui and Sakura shot him matching looks of surprise. Flushing, he swallowed the mouthful of beef he'd been chewing and continued. "Earth are the ones telling us this stuff, right? But it doesn't make sense, if you look at the exchanges between the colony ship 'paths and the Earth ones, there's whole chunks of censored information."

"But that's how 'path talk works," Sakura countered. "They don't really talk in words, everyone says that."

"Um," Yuui said, and both the kids glanced at him. "Actually, they do. They're trained that way. It's the empaths who 'talk' in pictures and feelings, and nobody's sure whether empaths are really a seperate species of psionic or proto-'paths."

"Does it matter?" Kurogane said.

"I'm just saying, it seems really... fishy," Syaoran argued. "We already know Earth lies, they did it about the Princess and... and about you and Fai-san, right?" He pointed his chopsticks at Yuui, who had to nod agreement with this.

"Didn't think you were a conspiracy theorist, kid," Kurogane said.

"Well, he has a point," Yuui replied, and Kurogane shot him a look of mild exasperation. "There's obviously something going on with Earth's space program and psionics."

"Yes," Sakura agreed slowly. "Like with Fai-san. You said you didn't know what they wanted him for, right?"

Yuui shook his head, and busied himself taking another mouthful of his food. Kurogane was steadily demolishing his way through his dish with no complaints, which was a very high compliment from him. Sakura twirled her chopsticks experimentally and said, slowly, "What could they be trying to lie about, with regards to the New Tokyo colony? Was there something special about it?"

Kurogane snorted. "Nothing that makes it any different from all the other deep space rocks," he said scornfully. "Just dirt and cloned livestock and a few hundred people dreaming of an Earth that never existed."

"Says the spacer," Yuui couldn't resist needling him, and Kurogane rolled his eyes and went back to his dinner. For some reason Syaoran coughed awkwardly at this and looked away, and Yuui gave the top of his head a puzzled gaze before deciding it was time to change the topic. "So do you often have time to watch films, Captain Geek?"

That earned him a small irritable growl, and he grinned to himself in triumph. "'course I do," Kurogane said. "It's months from here to Jupiter. You don't think I'm going to be sitting in that damn captain's chair staring at displays all that time?"

"Syaoran-kun does," Yuui said sweetly.

"And he's too damn dutiful," said Kurogane. Syaoran turned faintly pink. "He could be down here or in his room... or in the engine room, if he wanted," and Syaoran squeaked and turned an even brighter shade.

"Oh, that would be nice," Sakura said, her own cheeks warmer than they should be. "If... if Syaoran-kun wanted to join me, I wouldn't mind at all."

Yuui met Kurogane's eyes across the table while the kids were avoiding eye contact by staring intently at their plates and trying to out-blush each other, and to his surprise the captain winked at him. He could feel a chuckle in his own chest and so he hastily took a bite of his food to waylay it. Kurogane was not a particularly subtle matchmaker.

The rest of dinner passed unremarkably. Sakura had to leave quickly to perform some maintenance before bed; she'd put it off for lessons and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Syaoran chose to follow her, leaving Kurogane behind to help deal with the dishes. It wasn't the first time they'd been alone together since he'd left the infirmary, but there was something... different about today, and after Syaoran had left and Yuui had stacked the last plate in the dishwasher Kurogane caught him with one broad palm cupping the back of his neck and bent down to kiss him.

Yuui leaned backwards, evading him before their mouths could meet, and Kurogane let him go with a frustrated growl. "Are you really going to do this?" he said. "This hot and cold, pretending like you don't want this thing? Haven't you had enough of being so fucking indecisive?"

"No," said Yuui. "I'm just not kissing you when you've eaten tuna."

Kurogane paused. "Oh," he said.

"Captain Fish can try again after he's brushed his teeth," Yuui added archly, and Kurogane sighed.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, but he had the grace to look a little bit guilty. Yuui didn't feel like telling him that he had had thoughts about doing just what he'd been accused of - denying this _thing_, pretending he hadn't kissed Kurogane that day in the infirmary or that it didn't matter or something stupid, because in truth he wasn't quite sure what the hell to do.

It had been two weeks since he'd pulled Kurogane down for a kiss in the infirmary bed, sick and lonely and scared and wanting that much contact with someone warm and there. Two weeks and there had been other kisses, ranging from the confident to the hesitant. Kurogane didn't kiss like Fai, and he seemed surprised by Yuui's expertise. Two weeks and all the flirting and strangeness between them even before that, and Yuui didn't _know_, because he had sworn he wouldn't do this, and he was here now with the Captain's body heat still burning against him even though the man himself had moved away, and the back of his neck where Kurogane's palm had rested was still tingling.

_Idiot_, he thought at himself angrily, and half-turned away from Kurogane to wipe down the galley surfaces. His throat began ticking and his chest contracted with another fit of coughing halfway through, and he hid his mouth in his upper arm as he let out several hoarse, barking coughs. Kurogane made a cranky noise and flipped the switch on the kettle, opening one of the cupboards and taking out the 'flu tea he kept making Yuui drink to soothe his throat after all the coughing, and he thrust the box at Yuui grumpily.

"Make some of that," he said, and Yuui nodded wearily and fetched a mug. He was aware of Kurogane's eyes boring on him from behind as he emptied the sachet into the bottom of the cup and added the hot water, detaching the plastic spoon from the packaging to help the tea dissolve faster.

"Thank you," he said, a little raspily, and sensed Kurogane's flippant shrug out of the corner of his eye.

"This is why I want you to wait to get your brother out of that box," Kurogane said abruptly. "He's sick, isn't he? He looked pretty roughed up when I saw him."

Yuui thought about downplaying Fai's condition, his fingers lacing around the mug of tea, and then decided he would truly be a fool to do so. "Yes," he said. "I think they tortured him, Captain."

"Yeah," Kurogane said. "I worked that one out already. Was he lucid?"

That one hurt. Yuui closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, remembering his twin's babbling. "... No. Not particularly."

"I see."

"I'm sorry for not mentioning it sooner," Yuui said, quietly, and Kurogane snorted.

"You should have," he said sharply. "You want to unbox a psionic with an unknown talent on my ship, and now you tell me he's unhinged. I get why you didn't, psychic, but I'm the Captain. I have to keep us safe. _All_of us."

"I know," Yuui replied softly, and Kurogane's boots scraped across the floor as he came to Yuui's side and touched his shoulder with surprising gentleness.

"Tell me," he said, "and be absolutely honest. You know him. Do you think he's dangerous?"

Yuui shook his head, suddenly unable to speak, and his vision was blurring as his throat clogged with something that wasn't down to vacuum damage to his lungs. Dimly he sensed Kurogane putting an awkward arm across his shoulders, his blazing body heat comforting even as he felt his heart was tearing in two, because he hadn't wanted to think of Fai as that - as something dangerous, an unknown weapon, a threat, as _anything_but as Fai, his twin and his best friend and his lover for all of his life.

But he was a potential danger. Even if his mystery gift wasn't a lethal one, Yuui was suddenly coming to realize that the real reason he had decided not to cook with Fai in in his care wasn't because he thought Fai might need him but because some part of him already knew Fai could no longer be trusted around safety hazards. That his brilliant mathematician twin might cut himself with a kitchen knife or burn himself on a hot stove, like a _child_.

The knowledge hit him harder than losing Fai ever had, grief like a needle in his chest, but Kurogane was _here_ and he didn't - he couldn't - he _wouldn't_think of that. He turned his face away from Kurogane, and took several shaky breaths before sipping at his tea.

"Look," Kurogane said, his voice a steady rumble. He let go of Yuui and stepped away, and despite himself Yuui turned to look at him; he was standing in the middle of the galley with his hands in his pockets. "If you think he's fine, then whatever. You can defrost him. But you need to take responsibility for him, okay?"

"Yeah," Yuui said, his voice stiff and sad. "Don't worry. I wasn't intending to do anything else."

Kurogane sighed and reached out, clearly on impulse, and caught his sleeve. "I didn't think you were," he said, firmly. "But... Look. I don't want the kids near him, just in case, but if you need help..." His red eyes cut away, uncomfortably. Yuui stared at him, aware of how ridiculous his face must look. "If you need any help," Kurogane continued. "I don't mind. You're not alone anymore, spoonbender."

_I never used to be, either_, Yuui thought with a pang of sadness. _Fai was always there for me_. But Fai was broken, and he wouldn't be himself for a long time, and it wasn't _fair_ . He forced himself to smile, and thanked Kurogane in a low voice; the Captain made a cranky _Tch!_noise and let go of him, stuffing his hands back in his pockets and scowling at the dishwasher as though it had personally wronged him.

"You gonna be okay in that closet?" he asked abruptly, and Yuui lifted his eyebrows, confused. "The room you've got," Kurogane clarified. "It's not really built for two."

"We can adapt," Yuui said. They'd shared a smaller bed growing up, although they had been smaller then too. Kurogane nodded, uncomfortably, and Yuui realized it was the first time he'd seen his grouchy, gruff, larger-than-life Captain look anything other than fully confident.

"If... If you want, I could. Uh. My cabin's plenty large. You could stay with me, and let your brother have your room," he said.

If his expression had looked absurd before, Yuui was sure his face now could only be described as ridiculous. It was only sheer willpower that kept his jaw from dropping open, and he sensed the only thing that prevented him having his dumbstruck features commented upon was that Kurogane seemed to be having immense difficulty holding eye contact, instead staring at a point two inches above and six inches beside Yuui's left ear.

It took him some time to find his voice again, and when he did his first instinct was to blurt out something stupid, some unnecessary comment about what this meant. Instead he held his tongue and thought about it, and realized there was only one response to that that he could make. He shook his head, and now Kurogane's eyes focused on him as his eyebrows drew together.

"You're going to share that cabin?" he said, brusquely, and Yuui nodded.

"He's going to need me," he said quietly. "I want to be near him, so he doesn't need to go far. Thank you, though, Captain." For once he didn't attach a ridiculous suffix to the title, to convey how touched he was by the offer. "Perhaps once he is a little better, but for the immediate future, I... I want to be where he can reach me."

_And where I can reach him, _he thought. The thought of having Fai back in his arms was a reassuring one, no matter what. He just didn't feel up to admitting the true reason he had no problem with sharing to the Captain.

"If you're sure," Kurogane said, sounding dubious. "Offer's out there, if you change your mind."

Yuui smiled for him, and it was a lot less fake now. "I know," he said. "Thank you."

Kurogane eyed him thoughtfully, and then grunted and nodded. "It's fine," he said, briskly. "I'm going to go back to my cabin and watch another movie, _you_- " - and he pointed at Yuui with one oversized finger - "You, get your scrawny ass on those exercise machines. You're not going to have too much time in the future."

Yuui grinned at that. "Maybe not," he agreed mildly, and when Kurogane went to walk past him his hand darted out and grabbed the cloth of his yukata firmly by the elbow. Kurogane turned at the touch, head tilted curiously, and Yuui raised himself onto the balls of his feet to kiss him; he didn't shy away this time and their mouths met, soft and firm.

Truth be told, he was _glad_ he had Kurogane. Glad enough he could even (mostly) overlook the tuna breath.

* * *

><p>In the end, he did it at night, when the shipboard lighting was low and the kids were asleep in their respective bedrooms. He didn't tell Kurogane what he was planning, but maybe he didn't have to; the man handed him the golden swipe card to the shuttle deck and said in a voice of affected indifference, "Our stuff is in the crate marked with black tape. When you're done bring the card back."<p>

"But -"

"There's a box of hypodermic needles under the bed in the infirmary," Kurogane interrupted, and only then turned to look at him, his red eyes sharp. "Do whatever you want."

It took several trips to gather the supplies, and he had to pile most of them up on his bed; the folded medical blanket, the box of needles (combination-locked), the crate containing sacks of plastic-wrapped powders and vials of clear colourless liquids; scissors, nail files, spare clothes, a thermos flask of tea and another of tasteless shipboard broth, an electric self-heating cannister of recycled bathing water, a bucket, a sponge and a bar of soap to go with it - but eventually he had what he needed, and it was just him and the cryo-container in the corner.

He didn't know how Fai would be. Tired, obviously; being frozen in suspended animation wasn't anything like real sleep. Tired, and anxious, and... sane, with any luck, because surely the stuff that they'd given him had been what was behind his disorientation and his paranoia. Not that it mattered. He would do anything he could either way.

Still. It had been long enough. Way back on Earth he had wanted to get Fai out here in the endless black, where he would have time to understand what had happened, and he was here now, and it was time. He tapped at the cryo-storage unit's keypad, and told it to defrost its occupant, and it flashed him an hourglass and a progress bar.

**06:00:00** , it flashed at him. Six hours to thaw, and then Fai would be here, for better or for worse. Yuui drew in a deep breath, ignored the voice that whispered, _and how's he going to feel about the Captain? _and thumbed the 'start' button, and the clock stopped flashing and began counting down, implacable and inevitable.

_Here we go,_ he thought.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	17. 14: in my head i'm a chemical dreamer

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah** and... you know what, I don't even know who wrote most of this chapter, we both wrote a lot of it._

* * *

><p>so hard to concentrate, you can't<p>

he's saying he'll see him again, sleep now, but fai can't

focus, it's

(you) he's falling apart, too much in his head, in his _head_

(concentrate concentrate concentrate concentrate concentrate what does the word concentrate even mean)

colors swirling like roads leading him away but he/you can't follow them because when you try you know pain and

"You'll wake up to see me, or - or you won't wake up at all," he says and you know he means it because he is you and you are him and he only lies to other people, and

and he won't let them take you back, lips on yours, a parting kiss and then it

just

stops.

blackness sweet and gentle, colors fading away as the sedation kicks in, rainbow edges around everything but fai closes his eyes and he's alone in his head and nothing can reach him here

And then he woke up.

* * *

><p>Cold and noise, and when he opened his eyes, dark.<p>

Sleep unit. He knows this, doesn't he?

( _You_ _are much older than most of those we find, Mister Flowright._

Yuui, I want Yuui -

_No_. )  
><em><br>_His breath catches in his throat and for a moment he couldn't draw another one, terror closing in on him with the echoes of voices in his ears, because Yuui said he would wake up to him and there is nothing but black, except the _colors _are leeching in again at the edges and he couldn't even describe them because they were not colors the human eye should ever recognize, and -

air on his face, the sky moving, where was he? and he didn't...

concentrate concentrate concentrate concentrate

Yuui's face pops over the edge of the box, forehead creased with worry, and yes, he kept his promise; fai lolls his head back and sucks in steady gulps of air. Feels different here. Empty. Moved?

(_concentrate concentrate concentrate concentrate_)

"Fai," Yuui says, his whole face softening, "Fai, it's me."

He can't remember talking, movement of lips and tongue. Vibration of the vocal cords. Voice box. Shapement of air and and and and and

Yuui's face vanishes from his view and he makes a noise (so that's how it works) until it reappears; he reaches up clumsily (everything so slow) and tries to touch Yuui's cheek but he can't reach and he's just too tired to calculate trajectories and reach and adjust position accordingly and Yuui reaches down (so fast, he's moving so _fast_) and picks up his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. Worry in his eyes. That's not right, it's

tired, thirsty, cold, hurting, strange taste in his mouth like metal, too many _things _happening and he's somewhere new and he doesn't know, he can't, he's going to jump he can feel it but they hurt you if you jump so he pushes it down and his breath comes hoarse and sharp and Yuui squeezes his hand tighter, and you clutch it back desperately, trying to make some sense -

"Fai, calm down," he says, "You're hyperventilating - Fai, _calm down_, stop it, look at me -"

"They're coming for me, they're coming for me, they're going to catch me," Fai whispers and his voice is a stranger's, he can see them clearly laying plans miles and miles away, he's too valuable to be lost for long and

and farseer and dreamseer and kinetic and jumper all here, what's

"Where is this place?"

"You're on a spaceship," Yuui says, stroking his thumbs over Fai's cheekbones, palms cradling his face. "It's alright, they found us but we fought them off. You're safe here."

That's a lie, he can see them making plans, but Yuui always tries so hard and you're so _tired _and so hungry. You fist his hands in Yuui's clothes and use him to sit up, your breath whistling from between gritted teeth (so long doing nothing except being hurt) and he supports him.

"Sssssh," Yuui whispered, his palms sweeping gently over the arc of fai's collarbones. "Ssssh, you're okay. I know you're tired, Fai, but you're going to be fine. I'll give you some stuff in a bit, that should help settle you, okay?"

you stare intently into his eyes, warm and blue. no blue eyes there except your own, mirrored in the glass. he talks to the reflection and pretends it was yuui somedays, but this is the real thing although he looks. different. smells changed.

"Where is this place?" you ask and his face falls

and you don't know

why.

* * *

><p>The six hours dragged by, but Yuui knew they would. Mokona played him a few films, and he browsed through a couple of books, but his attention was wholly devoted to the steadily ticking clock, the hiss and occasional wisp of escaping ice vapor curling through the cabin air as the cryo-unit gently woke its occupant. When it began to register an increase in vital signs, he abandoned all attempts at distraction and climbed to his feet, hovering over the box and staring anxiously through the glass port as the fog cleared and the countdown ticked out the last few minutes.<p>

Fai looked dreadful, his skin grey with the anti-freeze gel and his hair, long and mattered, bunched up around him with ice crystals shining in it. There were large dark circles about his eyes, and his bones pushed against his skin, and Yuui was very grateful he had bought food.

Broth first, he decided. He hadn't fed Fai since he'd rescued him, and God only knew when they had fed him before that. After that he'd help his twin wash the gunk off himself, and then the drugs, if Fai needed them.

The unit sounded _zero_ with a small alarm, but he was already scrabbling with the storage unit's lid, his blunt fingernails scraping at the latch. His mouth felt dry and his hands were shaking minutely as he popped the catch and hefted the lid off; a great cloud of fog whistled into the air, temporarily blinding him, and then it faded and there was just... Fai, resting amidst the protective backing, his bruised eyelids sealed and his lips turning pink as his circulation resumed.

Yuui could feel his blood pulsing in his ears, and nervously he wedged the useless lid besides the cryo unit, between it and the bed. When he glanced back, Fai had opened his eyes; his pupils were dilated and he looked muzzy and barely there, but he was _awake_ and that was something. Yuui expelled the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and folded his arms on the edge of the box, and Fai's gaze tracked slowly toward him. Focusing, that was a good sign, right?

"Fai," he said, working hard to keep his voice from quivering too much. "Fai, it's me."

If his twin heard him, he didn't respond, not immediately. His eyes stayed glued on Yuui's though, and his lips moved slowly; he might have been sounding out Yuui's name but he wasn't sure. Unable to gaze for too long at the cloudiness in those familiar blue eyes Yuui turned away quickly, flipping the switches on the cans of washing water and broth to reheat their contents, but Fai made a small noise and Yuui was back again before it had even fully registered.

Fai was moving - sluggishly, but it was there; when he saw Yuui had returned he reached out toward Yuui's face with a shaking, skinny hand, but fell short and collapsed backward onto the padding. Yuui swallowed heavily and leaned down, picking up that hand, and covered it with both of his.

"It's okay," he said gently. "It's okay, Fai. I'm here. You're safe."

But Fai couldn't hear him, his breathing speeding up as he worked himself into a panic, and Yuui hated the Earth government then more than he had ever hated anything else. He was babbling himself, he knew, wordless reassurances and pleas for Fai to stop this; his twin's eyes were rolling back in his head and his thin chest was rising and falling and Yuui didn't know what to _do_. He clutched at Fai's hand, trying to ground him, and then bent forward and raised it to his lips and pressed a soft kiss against his knuckles.

This seemed to work when words hadn't, and he could have shouted his joy when Fai's breathing began to slow, his gaze focusing once more on Yuui's. Yuui gave him the biggest, brightest smile he could, and Fai's lips parted slightly as he mouthed something - looked like _they're coming for me_. Well, at least Yuui could reassure him on that front. He leaned over the lip of the capsule, stroking Fai's hair away from his face and cupping his twin's head, thumbs following the line of his jaw.

"Where is this place?" Fai asked, his voice soft and dazed, and Yuui squeezed his hand again and told him.

"They found us, but we fought them off," Yuui added, and Fai frowned minutely. He realized he was stroking his twin's face, the anti-freeze gel scratchy against the balls of his thumbs, and didn't stop as he reached for something to add to that; all he could come up with was the somewhat hollow-sounding, "You're safe here."

He helped Fai sit up, his twin so frail and thin compared to him. It reminded him uncomfortably of the distant past, the two of them scrounging food any way they could because there was none in the cupboard, and the thinness of Fai's long wrists wasn't helping with that comparison. At least there was food here, free for the taking. Once Fai had had something to eat he could decide what to work on next, the drugs or the bath; the anti-freeze gel on his skin was obviously itchy because Fai kept scratching at it with his free hand, and Yuui was unable to resist the urge to stroke his fingers along the sharp v of Fai's collarbones. He didn't understand why Earth would go to all this trouble for Fai if they couldn't even feed him right.

"I know you're tired, Fai, but you're going to be fine," he said, and his twin blinked at him sluggishly. Fai was having no trouble with eye contact, at least, which was a good sign. "I'll give you some stuff in a bit. That should help settle you, okay?"

Fai just looked at him for several long seconds, breathing softly, and then asked again quietly, "Where is this place?"

He felt like he'd been slugged in the stomach, a good body blow that shocked the breath out of him, but he closed his eyes and swallowed and tried to push it away. "You're on a space ship," he said, again. "We're in space, Fai. You always wanted to go to space, remember?"

Fai glanced away, his free hand scratching harder at his ribs, and Yuui reached down and caught it, pulling it away. His twin's stomach gurgled loudly then, and Fai seemed faintly surprised by the noise.

It wasn't fair, Yuui thought, angrily. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. He didn't say anything about that though, just let Fai's hands go, stroked his matted, coarse hair, and said, his voice cracking halfway through, "Would you like some food now, Fai?"

Fai nodded after only a ten-second delay this time, which Yuui supposed was something. He turned his back on Fai to pour the chicken broth into a mug - one of Kurogane's, he was sure; it bore the logo of a Martian spaceship component dealer, complete with their website and email address - and took a sip himself, testing to see whether or not it was too hot. It felt okay. "Here," he said, turning back to Fai, and very nearly dropped it on his foot.

His twin had a hold of a hunk of his hair and was _pulling_, his face grim and determined as he tore it free. He'd already taken out another handful and it was a miracle Yuui managed to set the mug down before his hands snaked out, closing firmly around Fai's and forcing him to let go; Fai lost a few more strands in the process and made a small, surprised noise as they came out. The locks he'd already torn out sat grey and greasy in his palm, and his scalp showed pinkly through the rest; Yuui hissed out a breath in horror as he saw beads of blood welling to the surface.

"Concentrate," Fai told him crossly as he pushed the remaining hair aside to better look at the scalp. "Got to concentrate concentrate concentrate made from concentrate oranges and -"

"Why did you do that?" Yuui breathed, combing Fai's hair away from his face swiftly with his fingers and pulling out his own hair tie to knot it in a loose ponytail. Fai growled.

"Eating, focus. Have. Concentrate!"

Yuui reached down and pulled the loose strands of hair out of Fai's palm, and his twin made an indignant noise and reached for them. He was going to have to cut it, Yuui realized, if Fai was going to do this again. "Don't do that," he said breathlessly. "Don't do that again, Fai."

In a voice that rose in volume with every word, Fai snapped, "Pay attention! Do this, do that, I can't even _see_ I promise I won't, just stop, I'll -"

"Ssssh!" Yuui said, frantically. His twin was almost shouting, and the kids and the captain were still asleep practically next door... "Sssh, Fai, ssh - calm down, it's okay, I'm not mad -"

"Mad?" Fai turned to stare at him, and seemed to relax. "Yes. Mad. Refuge in seeing things that were never meant to be seen, you take... Where is this place?"

It hurt less, this time. Yuui kissed Fai's forehead, wiping the gel off his mouth with the back of his hand, and gave his twin a shaky smile. "It's a spaceship, Fai," he said, and didn't bother elaborating this time; Fai's stomach rumbled audibly again and Yuui reached for the mug of broth.

Fai didn't seem to understand how to hold it by the handle, and his hands shook so badly Yuui ended up holding it for him as he drank. He misjudged the angle and spilled too much of the broth into Fai's mouth and his twin choked, excess liquid running down his chin and dripping miserably onto his lap, but Yuui didn't stop to clean it up until the mug was drained.

He made Fai drink another mugful, but Fai took no more than a mouthful of a third before he spat it back out and began gagging, tears leaking involuntarily from the corners of his eyes. Yuui guessed two mugs of broth was more than Fai had had to eat in a very long time, and wiped the tears away carefully with his thumbs. A kind of numbness had settled into his heart, fogging his vision, and distantly he was aware of his own eyes stinging, but he knew now wasn't the time to lose focus and so he pushed it down.

When he put the mug of broth down Fai threw his arms around his neck and clung to him tightly, his muscles quivering under Yuui's hands, and Yuui slid his own arms around Fai and hugged him back quietly, running his palm gently down the sharp knobs of his twin's spine and babbling nonsense into Fai's ear in a soothing tone of voice. It seemed to be working.

_Whatever they did to you_, he thought, _You're still my brother_. They would survive this because they had to. It had to be fixable, because... because...

He squeezed his twin tighter, pressing his cheek against the side of Fai's ear. The dried gel was crusted and itchy against _his_ skin, and after a moment he drew back and rubbed at the bridge of Fai's nose with his thumb. "Let's get this off you, okay?" he said, displaying the grime across the pad of his thumb to Fai, and his brother's eyes darted to various points around the cabin before he nodded.

"Where are we?" he asked, as Yuui helped him take off the ratty hospital gown from the R & D unit back on Earth so long ago. There were more marks across his skin underneath it, but Yuui knew he wouldn't be able to get a good look at them until the gel had been cleaned off him.

Keeping his twin firmly in his gaze lest he repeat the hair-yanking incident, Yuui dragged the washbucket over in front of him, flipping the cap on the canister of bath water and filling it. The cabin was soon filled with the faint scent of the chemicals used to cleanse the non-drinking water, and the water vapor from the steam wafting gently from the bucket. Fai shrank away from it, shivering violently, and Yuui frowned and reached out, gently taking his twin's hand in his. His thumb fit snugly over the pulse-point in Yuui's wrist, and he could feel how rapid Fai's heartbeat was compared to his.

"We're in a spaceship," he said, his voice raspy and hoarse. "It's going to be okay, Fai. Are you cold?"

Fai didn't respond, but he told Mokona to raise the temperature in their cabin by five degrees Celsius, and the shipboard display lit up. "Affirmative," she said in her squeaky flat voice.

His twin lifted his head, startled. "Mokona?" he repeated.

"Awaiting orders," she said.

Fai narrowed his eyes, looking almost focused. "I see," he said. "Ichihara Industries prototype AI, project named Soel. Neutered personality core, microprocessing capabilities -"

Yuui gripped Fai's face between his, his thumbs following the sharp lines of his twin's cheekbones, and yanked his twin to face him. "Look at me," he ordered, despair riding behind his words, and felt a shivery wave of relief floating behind his breastbone when Fai did. "What did they do to you?"

For a long time he thought Fai wasn't going to reply, that the question was too much for him or had confused him, and then his brother's expression cracked and he said, in a whispery, little-boy voice, "They made me _see_."

There wasn't anything Yuui could say to that. He bumped his forehead silently against Fai's, their noses resting against against each other, and tried to push away the spike of pain in his chest. He had to be strong. _He_ had to be strong. He couldn't break down here. He swallowed down his grief, and said, quietly, "Let's get you bathed and dressed, okay?"

Fai didn't reply, but he didn't argue either, and he meekly went along with Yuui when Yuui pushed him to his feet with his 'kinesis and sat him on the edge of the bed. The anti-freeze gel was specifically designed to dissolve in contact with water to make clean-up easier, and he was grateful for that as he rolled up his sleeve and plunged his hand into the bucket, seizing the sponge.

His twin sat meekly as he ran the sponge across his face, closing his eyes when Yuui tapped at his eyebrows with an index finger, like nothing so much as a giant doll. Every stroke of the sponge left pale pinkness in its path, shockingly bright against the grey-green, and here and there he uncovered bruises he hadn't registered back on Earth. Fai's inner elbows were both one large bruise from all the blood samples he'd obviously had drawn, and he flinched when Yuui touched them; Yuui whispered his apologies into the quietness of the cabin and Fai didn't look at him, and if water was leaking down Yuui's own face, trickling down his cheeks and leaving faintly salty trails, well, then he'd obviously splashed himself by accident.

* * *

><p>It was well into midmorning, shipboard time, but the whole ship was as subdued as a night-cycle. They all knew that Yuui had started the defrosting process to bring his twin out of stasis; and although Syaoran and Sakura hadn't heard any of the ugly details Yuui had confided to Kurogane, they'd both picked up on the atmosphere of tension. Everyone knew, without it needing to be said, that the awakening of Yuui's brother was not likely to be a happy event.<p>

Kurogane paced around the galley, too distracted to even settle into an exercise routine. Sakura and Syaoran were talking to each other in subdued voices out in the corridor. They'd been collaborating with Mokona to set up a projected holographic digital display of the date and time on the wall of every room, and although the clutter annoyed Kurogane's sense of aesthetics he had to admit it made sense.

He glanced at the clock nearest to him, scowling at the brightly blinking digits that informed him it was now 09:14, 19/11/02, and decided abruptly that enough was enough. If things had gone to schedule, Yuui should have uncorked their guest almost two hours ago. Kurogane had the right - not only that, the _obligation - _to check on his new passenger's welfare.

Kurogane tried first to call up the guest cabin's number from the in-ship com system, but although the signal chimed several times there was no answer. Either Yuui hadn't noticed the hail for some reason, or couldn't answer it right now. Kurogane pushed down a twinge of worry, and thought to hell with it - he'd go down and check on them in person.

He paused momentarily when he reached the guest cabin - he could hear Yuui's voice through the door, raised in some kind of stress, but couldn't make out what he was saying. He knocked on the door swiftly and loudly several times, and paused to wait for a response.

The door slid open a crack. "Who's there?" Yuui's voice called through the door; he sounded weary.

"It's me," Kurogane said. "I'm coming in."

Without waiting for assent he punched his captain's override into the door panel, sliding it open against Yuui's rising protests. "Wait, no, we're not -"

Kurogane climbed about halfway up the ladder into the guest cabin and stopped, folding his arms on the floor. There wasn't much further he _could_ get into the room - the crate had taken up most of the floor space even when it was sealed, and now that its cover was open and its support mechanisms pulled halfway out and scattered everywhere the cabin was completely impassible. To get to the hatch the cabin's occupants would either have to climb over the gutted crate, or crawl around in the wall niche that the bed occupied.

Occupying the wall niche itself was Yuui, looking tired and upset and haggard, and a naked pale copy of him, looking twenty times worse. Two sets of startling blue eyes focused on him; one curious and uncomprehending, the other glaring.

"We're not dressed," Yuui said in aggravation. Kurogane snorted, dismissing that detail impatiently as he appraised his new guest's condition. He'd been cleaned of the medical goo that the triage chamber required, but that only revealed a new wealth of old bruises and disturbing marks on his skin.

"Who's that?" the brother - Fai, Kurogane reminded himself - asked curiously. He made a move as though trying to move off the bed towards the door, but listed to the side and was barely saved from cracking his head against the lid of the triage chamber by a quick grab from Yuui.

"It's the captain, Fai," Yuui told him in a weary voice. "Captain Kurogane."

It was the first time Kurogane had ever heard Yuui use his full name and title, and he didn't enjoy it as much as he'd thought he would. Yuui was sitting behind his brother with a pair of blunt scissors in his hand, and long strands of gel-matted hair were strewn across the mattress beneath them. "How is he?" Kurogane asked.

"He's fine. We're both fine. Go away," Yuui said, which was such obvious bullshit that Kurogane rolled his eyes and unfolded from the doorway, climbing the rest of the way into the cabin.

As Kurogane straightened to his full height and took a step forward, Fai's reaction was immediate and dramatic. His eyes widened as they tracked up Kurogane's full height, and his whole body flinched away. A small noise leaked from his lips as he tried to press himself further into the niche, away from the door. "Who is that?" he asked, his voice sharp-edged with fear.

Kurogane paused, stock still at the force of Fai's reaction. "It's Captain Kurogane, Fai." Yuui told his brother in a hopeless voice. He scrambled around in the bed until he was facing his brother, taking hold of both his shoulders. "Calm down, he won't hurt you. He owns this spaceship, he's our friend."

Fai swallowed visibly, the ribs starkly visible on his chest as his breathing quickened. His blue eyes darted from one point in the air to another without seeming to focus on anything. "Where is this place?" he demanded.

"I told you, we're on a -" Yuui broke off and took a deep breath, his frustration obvious. "I'm sorry, captain. I can't seem to make him remember. I've told him half a dozen times already and he just doesn't seem to be listening."

Kurogane grunted understanding, taking a careful step back so he wouldn't loom so badly. Fai's blue eyes locked onto him again at the movement, and the man's body was tense, faintly trembling. Kurogane tried to steel himself against pity, against a reckless compassion that might overwhelm caution and good judgment, but it was hard. "How is he aside from that?"

"_Aside_ from that?" Yuui said incredulously. He had both hands on his brother's shoulders, trying to ground him and reassure him, but he twisted his head to give Kurogane a disbelieving glance. "He doesn't know where we are or what happened! That's a pretty big thing, don't you think?"

"Give it time," Kurogane said quietly. "Waking up out of cryo isn't like taking a nap in the middle of a day. You've got to expect some disorientation."

He knew that better than most, he thought grimly, remembering his own confused awakening. He could have wished to see a face as friendly and familiar as Yuui's when he'd woken up in that cold and sterile chamber, but he vividly remembered the confusion, the gut-wrenching nausea, the horrible sensation of being disconnected from everything and falling through the world.

"I don't think it's just that," Yuui said, with a ragged catch in his voice. "He - he - I don't know."

"He recognizes you at least, doesn't he?" Kurogane reasoned. "Last thing he knew, you were both on Earth. For you, you've had weeks to adjust to your life being turned upside down. For him, it was just a few hours ago. Just be patient."

"Yuui," Fai interrupted, and Kurogane realized with a slight jolt that the voice he'd heard through the door earlier - the one he'd mistaken for Yuui's, stressed with anger or fear - had been his. "Yuui, I'm thirsty."

Yuui's attention snapped back to his twin immediately. "Of course, Fai," he said tenderly, and Kurogane suddenly felt like an intruder, a voyeur. Yuui twisted himself awkwardly, reaching over the edge of the bed to fumble for the strap on one of the thermoses strewn across the room.

Kurogane watched, but made no move to help; his size and bulk obviously frightened Fai, and Kurogane hated to think about what that implied. "You don't need this thing any more," he commented, prodding the empty canister with his toe. "I'll get Syaoran to come up with a hand tractor and move it out, so you'll have more room to spread out." Small as he was, the kid was much less likely to register as a threat on Fai's scattered consciousness.

Yuui gave him a wan smile. "Thanks," he said, and Kurogane knew he didn't just mean for the space. It was a concession on his part, and he knew Yuui caught it; that Kurogane didn't think Fai was going to be a danger to the kids. Well, he wasn't. He was in such a bad state, weak and incoherent, that he wasn't likely to be a danger to anyone except himself.

Fai's shivering was increasing, until the shakes were visible even from across the room. The temperature in here was considerably hotter than the rest of the ship; Kurogane didn't think it was just cold. "Yuui," Fai croaked. One unsteady hand clawed outwards, catching in the fabric of his twin's shirt. "It hurts - Yuui, I don't understand - where are…?"

"Shh, Fai, it's all right," Yuui said, rocking his twin slightly as he closed his eyes in despair. "I know what's wrong. I'll give you something to fix it in just a moment, okay?"

Even hidden in the symptoms of Fai's general confusion and poor physical condition, Kurogane recognized the symptoms of Sleeper withdrawal - he'd seen them plenty of times on Europa and Ganymede. He felt suddenly uncomfortable, embarrassed on Fai's behalf in a way he hadn't been to see the man naked, and knew it was time to depart. "Listen," he said in a subdued voice, "I'll give you half an hour. Then I'll send the kid up to get rid of this box."

He paused a moment, searching for something else to say. "Let him know whatever else you need, and we'll get it to you. And learn to answer your cabin's com, will you?"

Yuui's face lit up in a tired smile, and he nodded to the speaker panel on the far side of the room - completely blocked off by the heavy canister. Kurogane rolled his eyes. "All right," he said. "Anything else?"

Yuui shook his head. "No, but - wait -" he said, and Kurogane turned back from where he'd started for the door. He met Yuui's eyes, reddened with fatigue, and was surprised by the warmth he saw there. "Thank you, Captain," Yuui said quietly. "For everything."

* * *

><p>Sakura was in the galley, nervously standing over a covered skillet while she watched the seconds tick by on the new wall-clock. She was trying to reproduce one of the recipes Yuui-san had taught her, but while he had made it look easy and the recipe book made it sound so simple, it was turning out to be more complicated than she'd anticipated. Yuui-san had done half a dozen tasks at once and still always seemed to know when things needed to be done, but Sakura had to go through one step at a time lest her meal revert to a Syaoran-style lump of charcoal briquettes.<p>

She cast her eye over the green glow of the large digits on the walls, and couldn't help but smile. She'd had another vision this morning - of standing in this very same galley cooking something, actually - and the clock had been there. As instructed, she'd dutifully recorded the date and time and location in her log book, and then wondered what she was supposed to do next.

But Yuui-san hadn't appeared at all on the ship today; he hadn't come out for breakfast, and it was getting to late lunchtime with still no sign of him. If this rice and lemon chicken dish turned out all right, she might could bring him and his brother a bowl - but the captain had strictly forbidden them from going near the guest cabin until they knew for sure whether their new passenger was going to be okay.

Of course, it also wasn't helping her concentration on the meal that Syaoran was in the galley too, seizing the Captain's absence to get his turn on the exercise machine. He was dressed in a thin tank top, now plastered sweatily against his skin. Sakura kept sneaking surreptitious glances in his direction, thinking how nice it was to see him out of the bulky, obscuring lines of his vacuum suit for a change…

Sharply-defined muscles stood out against the lines of his arms and shoulders as he lifted and lowered the bars, and Sakura felt a heat creeping up her chest and throat and face that had nothing to do with the stove. He wore sweatpants rather than shorts, probably out of a misplaced sense of modesty for her, but all Sakura could think was that it made him look older and more mature than ever.

A hiss from the cookpot boiling over brought Sakura's attention sharply back to the stove, and she hurriedly lifted the lid and stirred the chicken down. A waft of scented steam rolled past her, and behind her she heard Syaoran sniff appreciatively. "That smells great, Princess," he said.

"Thanks," Sakura said, a touch of a blush rising in her cheeks at the compliment. "I hope you like it, because it's the only dish Yuui-san has managed to teach me so far. We're probably going to be eating a lot of it."

"Ah." The weights banged down against the bar, and Syaoran sat up, breathing heavily. Glancing at the timer, Sakura decided she could spare a few seconds to pick up a sealed water bottle and bring it over to him. He smiled gratefully at her as he slung his hand towel around his neck and took the water from her. "Maybe you can try to teach me that recipe? It doesn't seem fair that you should have to do all the cooking."

"I don't know that it was fair to make Yuui-san do it all, either," Sakura said, frowning slightly at the thought. She was not at all sure enough of her teaching ability to prevent the disasters that always seemed to accompany Syaoran into the kitchen. "But it's not just about fairness. Whoever can do it, will have to do it, and Yuui-san is…"

She trailed off, and a slightly glum silence fell between them as their thoughts turned towards their missing friend.

Heavy footsteps sounded on the deck plating outside, and they both looked up as Kurogane entered the rec room, frowning heavily. Both their attentions turned to him, the question of dinner immediately forgotten.

"Is something wrong, Captain?" Syaoran asked him.

"How are Yuui-san and his brother?" Sakura couldn't help adding.

"Nothing that we didn't expect," Kurogane grunted somewhat disconsolately. "The blond idiot's doing fine. His brother… is awake, at least."

If "awake" was the best adjective that could be applied to him, Sakura didn't really like the sound of that. She frowned worriedly.

Kurogane turned his focus on Syaoran. "When you get a chance, I want you to run up to their cabin," he directed the younger man. "Bring a tool set and a tractor unit so you can clear that cryo cabinet out of the way. We don't need it there any more, and they don't have much room with it knocking around in there."

"Oh, of course!" Syaoran said, nodding firmly as he accepted the mission.

"I can go, too," Sakura seized on. "You know my tool set is a lot more complete than Syaoran's…"

"There might not be enough room for both of us, though," Syaoran warned her.

"But I can at least help!" Sakura said. "Besides, I haven't had a chance to meet Fai-san yet. With the amount that Yuui-san cares about him, he must be very special…"

Kurogane's frown deepened, and he rubbed a hand over his face. Then he sighed and looked directly at Sakura. "Look, you can go up there and introduce yourself if you like," he said. "He's not dangerous, so there's no real reason for that room to be off-limits to you. But keep it short. That guy just got out of cryo-sleep, he's confused and disoriented and probably could use peace and quiet more than anything else. Go on up and say hi, but don't make a fuss if he doesn't respond to you."

"Oh," Sakura said quietly. The mental picture that Kurogane painted was daunting; her hope that Yuui had overestimated the amount of help and care that his brother would need quickly faded. "Should we go now, or...?"

"No," the captain said firmly. "The pair of them need some time alone, and I'm not going to explain why, so don't ask. Give them about half an hour. I'm sure you can find something to do until then."

Sakura flushed. "I was cooking lunch," she admitted, and he actually looked momentarily surprised by this. "Don't look at me like that," she said hotly. "Yuui-san taught me how to make this! It'll be fine!" A thought struck her. "Actually... do you think I should put some aside for him and Fai-san, Captain?"

Kurogane grunted. "The first blond, yeah. The other one, no. Cryo tends to shrink your appetite."

Poor thing, Sakura thought, and then pushed it away. Fai-san wasn't a _thing_. Before she could ask any questions about the unfreezing process, something hissed sharply behind her, and she gasped as she spun around; the rice was boiling over.

Lunch was perfectly edible, to Sakura's relief. She sat down opposite Syaoran, the Captain in his usual seat at the head of the table. All three of them wolfed the meal down with gusto; although she couldn't help but wonder how long before they were all going to get sick of eating the same thing over and over. Longer than they had eating Syaoran's inedible cooking every day, at least.

After they were finished, Kurogane excused himself to head back up to the bridge, and Syaoran pushed to his feet. "Well, I'd better get up there to take apart that crate," he said. "Princess, did you want to come at the same time, or…?"

"Go ahead," Sakura told him. "I'll just clean up the dishes, and put some of the leftovers in a tray for them." She had made far too much food on purpose, and there was plenty to be stored for dinner tonight. She hesitated for a few minutes over how much food to put in, since the captain had said Fai-san probably wouldn't be hungry, but… better to have too much than not enough, she decided. They could always eat it later.

As she sealed the top on the zero-g food tray she always used for her own lunches in the engine room, the sound of shouting echoed faintly down from the corridor below.

Sakura broke into a run, the lunch box shoved in the carry-sack under her arm as she scrambled down the ladder into the hallway and galloped along the corridor towards the guest room. She was in time to see Syaoran back hurriedly down the ladder, losing his footing and falling the last few feet with a resounding thump. From the open hatch over his head, a voice that sounded like Yuui's was shouting hysterically.

"Don't you dare!" the angry voice was yelling. Behind it, Sakura could just make out Yuui-san's voice saying something soothing, but the words were lost in the din. "Don't you dare! Don't you touch him, don't you dare!"

"Syaoran-kun! What happened?" Sakura wanted to know, giving him a hand up to his feet.

"I, I don't know!" Syaoran sounded completely flabbergasted. "I just went up and introduced myself, and Fai - he - he just took one look at me and started screaming!"

"But he didn't for Kurogane, or else the captain would have said something…" Sakura said hesitantly. "Maybe you just surprised him?"

"I don't know, I…" Syaoran looked shaken, his brown eyes wide. Sakura hesitated, then started pulling herself up the ladder.

She could immediately see why Kurogane had tasked them with getting rid of the triage chamber; with it blocking off most of the space in the room, the two brothers were pretty much forced into the bed niche in the wall.

The two men seemed to be struggling, and it took Sakura a confused moment to sort out the scene. It was especially hard because Fai was wearing the shirt Sakura had gotten used to seeing on Yuui, together with a plain pair of ship-knit shorts. But Fai was thinner and frailer than his healthy brother, and yet despite this, he seemed to be trying to shove Yuui behind him, place himself between his twin and the hatch. Yuui, in the meantime, seemed to be trying to accomplish the same thing.

"I won't let him touch you," Yuui's twin was raving, his voice fierce and menacing despite looking like a high wind could snap him in two. "I know what he wants, I won't let him have it. He's not going to get your eyes, I won't let him! Don't you dare! Don't you dare!"

"Easy, Fai," Yuui was trying to soothe his twin, placate him. "It's just Syaoran. He's my friend. He's not going to hurt you, or me either. Just relax, okay? Just take it easy…"

"Um," Sakura said, feeling extremely daunted and unsure of her welcome. "Yuui-san, is everything all right…?"

Two sets of blue eyes turned towards her, and Fai's struggles abruptly ceased as he took her in. "Oh," he said in a small voice, and his expression was surprised and wondering. Free of the distorting fury, his resemblance to his twin was even more striking - but he was thinner, almost wasted, deeper hollows under his cheekbones serving to make his blue eyes even more vivid. "It's you. I remember you…"

"You do?" Sakura said in some confusion. At least he wasn't yelling or fighting again, but… this was very strange, far beyond the confusion and disorientation that the captain had warned them about. She climbed up the rest of the way into the cabin, and edged her way around the triage chamber towards the bed. "Um, hello… I'm Sakura."

After a quick glance at Yuui to make sure it was okay, she held out her hand towards Fai to shake Western-style. He took her hand, but instead of shaking it, held it in both his own as he intently scrutinized her fingernails. "It's not Tuesday," he said. "Why are you here?"

"I… I came up to say hello," Sakura said, even more unsure of herself. "And to bring you lunch," she added, remembering the lunchbox she'd stuck in her carry-sack before this whole thing started. Fai still had hold of her hand, so she fumbled it free left-handed and held it out, wavering between Fai and Yuui.

Yuui also took it one-handed - his other arm still wrapped around his brother's chest - and gave her a wan smile. "Thank you," he said. "I'm so sorry about earlier. I don't know what happened. I know for a fact my brother's never met Syaoran-kun before, I'm really sorry for upsetting him like this…"

"I'm sure it's fine," Sakura assured him. By craning her neck she saw just a sliver of Syaoran's head and hair, waiting just out of line-of-sight in the hatchway. "I'll explain to him - I'll try, anyway… it's just that - we originally came up to take the cryo box out of the way for you…"

"Oh, yes," Yuui said, looking faintly harassed. "The captain said he was going to send Syaoran-kun up - but I'm honestly not sure what's setting him off here. Maybe -" he broke off, looking back and forth from his brother to the capsule with growing frustration.

"Well, how did you get it up here in the first place?" Sakura said. She'd been wondering that since she'd first met him, actually.

That actually got a smile and a hint of a chuckle from Yuui. "I cheated," he said. "It was the only way. I suppose I could use my kinesis to get the box down the hatchway again, and Syaoran-kun could take it from there. But…" he hesitated.

"What's wrong?" Sakura wanted to know.

Yuui's expression took on a hunted look, as he glanced back at his twin. "I don't know - I'm afraid to let him go for too long," he said under his breath. "I'm worried he'll fall, or - hurt himself in some other way…"

Frankly Sakura had no idea what he was worried about, since it was only a few decimeters to the floor and they weren't in full earth-G anyway. But he obviously _was_ worried, and looking at Fai's pitiful condition she could see why. "I could sit with him," she offered. "I'd just be in the way if you're trying to get that box down the hatchway anyway."

"All right…" Yuui said. With some reluctance, he detached himself from his twin and scrambled awkwardly out of the bed, reaching tenuously across the triage chamber to bang shut the hatches and panels. Fai listed after him at first, making a plaintive noise of inquiry; Sakura slid hastily onto the bed niche and tugged him back towards the wall with the hold he still had on her hand. He returned his attention to her, his blue eyes wide and guileless, and Sakura gave him a tentative smile.

"Are you sure you won't get in trouble?" Fai asked her, his concern sounding sincere.

"I don't think so," Sakura said in confusion. Fai puzzled her; when he spoke, it was in normal-sounding tones as if he were having an ordinary conversation - except the things he said made no sense.

"I just don't want them to catch you out," Fai said sadly. "You shouldn't be in a cage. It's wrong."

"I'm not," Sakura said. She glanced over at Yuui, at a loss for what else to say, but he was fully engaged with tilting the triage chamber enough on its side to fit through the narrow hatch, without hanging up on the ladder.

Fai blinked at her, leaning forward and reaching up to brush a strand of hair out of her face, fallen loose from where she'd fastened it back before lunch. "You changed your hair," he said. He blinked, his eyes coming to focus on her face from an uncomfortably close distance. "You're not Suu," he said, sounding surprised.

"No, I'm not," Sakura said, finally catching on that he'd mistaken her for someone else. "I'm Sakura."

"Sakura," Fai repeated. A faint line appeared between his eyebrows, and his free hand crept up to tug on one of the long locks of hair that hung down past his shoulder. From this angle, Sakura could see that he was about halfway through a fairly major haircut; she could see strands of hair and the discarded scissors on the mattress beyond. "Sakura. Sakura bloom late march to april, depending on the - when the sakura is red that means a body - a body has been buried under the roots, but there is no -" His fingers twisted in the lock and pulled, hard.

"Please don't do that, Fai-san," Sakura said anxiously, reaching up to cover his hand with her own. "I don't want you to hurt yourself."

He blinked, his hand relaxing as he focused on her again. "Five hundred and twenty three million sixteen thousand four hundred twenty three point one four one five nine and zero point zero five four angles from the plane of ecliptic - where is this place?" he asked abruptly, cutting off his recitation of numbers.

"Um," Sakura glanced over at Yuui again. "We're on the Mokona, Fai-san. About a quarter of the way from Mars to Jupiter. We've been in space for about three weeks now."

"Oh," Fai said. He sounded quite surprised, as though this were complete news to him.

A resounding _thump _interrupted this decidedly disjointed conversation, and in the next moment Yuui reappeared, red-faced and out of breath from exertion.

"We're in _space, _Yuui," Fai said, sounding delighted.

Yuui stopped for a moment with his mouth hanging open, looking between Fai and Sakura. After a moment he closed it and managed, "Yes, we are. That's what I've been telling you for the last hour, Fai."

Now that there was a bit more room in the cabin, Yuui was able to sit on the edge of the bed niche with his legs stretched out on the floor, and pulled Fai back towards him. Fai went obligingly, but made a puzzled sound when his hand tugged Sakura's, which he still hadn't let go of.

"Ah - sorry," Yuui gave her a pained look, and tried to tug his twin's hand free from hers. "Let go of Sakura, Fai. She needs to go with Syaoran."

"Sakura?" Fai asked blankly. Yuui closed his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath.

"Um, I don't _have_ to go," Sakura said hesitantly. "I mean, I don't really have anything else I need to do, apart from helping take apart that triage unit. I could stay a little longer…"

"Could you?" Yuui looked at her in forlorn hope. "He seems to be so much calmer when you're around. This is the most coherent he's been all morning."

"Sure," Sakura said. "Tell you what, you still haven't eaten your lunch. You were in the middle of cutting Fai-san's hair, weren't you? Why don't you eat, and I'll help out with that?"

It took a bit of awkward rearranging - eventually Yuui and Fai both moved down to the floor, leaning back against the bed niche for support, while Sakura sat on the mattress above Fai and combed out and carefully snipped his hair. As long as she was there, she took the opportunity to even up some of Yuui's more ragged chops, figuring that Fai could at least look nice even if he wasn't feeling well.

Fai seemed to be in a good mood now, however, despite the outburst earlier. He leaned his skinny, bony back against Sakura's knees and chattered away at his brother, a mostly nonsensical stream of phrases that seemed to involve a long list of the hydrocarbon chemicals making up artificial lemon flavoring in the sauce.

She didn't really understand what was going on here, Sakura reflected as she patiently trimmed Fai's blond hair up to his nape. But in that, at least, she didn't think she was the only one.

* * *

><p>He'd had Mokona shut down as much of the machinery in their cabin as she could, and it was as close to silent as it was going to get. Fai had been fretful, but it had been a long day and his twin was exhausted. He'd fallen asleep quickly in the quiet and the dark, his fingers still wrapped bruisingly tight around Yuui's wrist, but Yuui found that oblivion harder to reach for.<p>

The stars outside bleached the cabin silver and pale, and Fai's breathing was steady and regular. The circles under his eyes were bleak indeed in the grey light, and Yuui quietly smoothed his fingers through Fai's short hair, feeling its feathery softness against his palm. He'd been right, it had been much easier to get the gunk out with it cut, even if it felt.. strange. The last time they'd had short hair they'd been six and had picked up lice from somewhere. Their mother had shaved it all off, and they'd cried the entire time.

Fai had barely noticed it happening this time, but it distressed Yuui to see that they were no longer identical. Perhaps he should cut his hair, too, or ask Sakura to do it for him. But then both of them wouldn't be watching Fai, and Fai... Fai needed watching. He didn't seem to have a firm grip on his surroundings, and Yuui couldn't... he couldn't ignore the voice that whispered _you made him worse_.

Kurogane said this disorientation was a natural side-effect of cryo, but Yuui knew better than that. Fai had been pretty out of it before he'd gone under. Being in cryo for so long hadn't _helped_, and who was to blame for that? Who had left him in there even once the drugs had been obtained? He should have done this earlier. He should have gotten the drugs before he took Fai onboard, even, so that Fai was only out for a few days at most. He should have done _something _differently_._

"I'm sorry," he whispered, bending down to touch his lips to Fai's temple. His twin's eyelids were flickering as his eyes underneath raced around in their sockets, and heaven only knew what his poor brother was dreaming of. It didn't look restive, and with a sigh Yuui settled down next to Fai, pressed tight against him on the narrow bed like they were children on the sofa again, Fai's soft breaths on his face. He had been asleep for too long, but it was not a peaceful slumber, and Yuui felt sick.

He'd kept Fai under for nothing more than convenience. He could have argued with Kurogane when the Captain ordered him to take bedrest, but he hadn't, because...

Because he had enjoyed the captain's company, and he had wanted just a little bit of time alone with him, and with the kids. Because he had been selfish. He had gotten too damn involved, and he had been too self-centered to remember what really mattered, which was what was here, right now, struggling to sleep. He had spent too long worrying and fretting about... about the captain, and for all that his heart fluttered when Kurogane kissed him, how could he have let that happen while Fai was still trapped, asleep and so broken?

He had always been aware that Fai was the selfless one, the one who gave up so much for his sake; and he had had the opportunity to repay him and he had let Fai sleep in favor of... of flirting and cooking and kissing. Because that's who he was, he thought, suddenly bitterly angry at so many things. At the staff of the psionic academy who had given Fai away like he was _nothing_; at the Eurasian government, who had done this to Fai; at himself, for not knowing more, moving faster, being _better_.

_Never again_, he thought furiously, and pressed another kiss against Fai's cheek. His twin twitched, his lips parting in his sleep, and Yuui loved him with a ferocity that caught him by surprise in its intensity, because it had been the two of them for so long and...

It would be that from now on, he decided, angrily. Fai needed him and Fai would get him. He had learned his lesson. He had been stupid and he had forgotten, but Fai's appalling condition had brought it back; they were each other's most important thing, and Yuui would... he wouldn't let go of that knowledge again.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	18. 15: poisoning my lonely soul

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

**Author's note: **Okay, I don't usually like outright giving story information in a meta field like this one, but the last chapter seems to have given some people the wrong idea, so instead of leading people down a misleading path I'll just clear this up here: _There are not, and will not be, any cloned versions of Syaoran or Sakura running around in this story whatsoever!_

Fai in the last chapter was extremely confused and unable to identify people correctly. He mistook Sakura for Suu, and he confused Syaoran with a guard from the Earth facility to whom he bears only a passing resemblance. We weren't originally going to give the guard's name at all, but we decided to do so in this chapter just to clear up any confusion. (A quick google-image search on the Guard's name will make it obvious how Fai could make that mistake.) No clone Syaorans, and that's a guarantee!

* * *

><p>they liked to tie you down.<p>

a long time ago - or now, maybe, time works strangely for him - fai thinks that would have been something to giggle about with yuui. 'tie you down,' bondage, rope play. one of the strippers at the club they worked used to do this thing with handcuffs and the patrons loved it. Lots of beer spilled to clean up after they were gone. You/Fai remembers.

this was not that sort of tying down. all thick leather cuffs, legs, feet, hands, belly, head. not the throat. no suffocation. lights in your eyes and needles in the dark, fai remembers. no walls, no sense of time, the only way to measure out the moments was in heartbeats and tiny amount of give that let you _bang... bang... BANG _his hand against the table.

... bang, bang BANG...

There was a soldier, used to come pick him up. Shaggy brown hair, small scar on the jaw, eyes that sometimes forgot to be neutral and looked almost like - that emotion, the one you distantly remember from Yuui who always was too kind for his own good... Oh. That's right, that's it. Soldier had _kind _eyes, as he bent and cinched the bonding, tight to stop him moving.

_It's for your own good,_ he'd say, or had said. _You don't want to move around with what they're doing to your eyes_.

You know what they're doing to your eyes, but Fai thought he would be in trouble for saying so. Shocks. Always with the shocks. So he said nothing and you cringed. Safest way to play it. Safest way to be.

Except it's not safety, not then and not now-then, if time can be measured in _then_ and _now_ then _now_ is always _then_, until they blur (blurred) together; he can see across a million light-years and know things that _are happening _and he knows safety and he knew he wasn't. Safe, that is, not knowing. He knows he knows. The soldier with the kind eyes was on the ship. Is on the ship. Different face, maybe, but sometimes Fai can see through the jagged rents. They said space and time were entwined, they said the universe is four-dimensional, they said... ant crawling on the blanket, fold the blanket and suddenly opposite corners meet, and maybe he should just take Yuui and fold the blanket -

no, he isn't doing that. can't leave. _Shocks_.

The brown-eyed soldier is on the ship and Yuui doesn't know enough to be scared. Fai can't go, not with him, they'll _hurt_ him. He can see them now in their faraway rooms, talking to each other, laying plans. Traps. Or perhaps now is _then _ and... and this used to be easier, before they cracked him, he knows. _Thinking. _That was... oh, what's the word, for things that happened then and not now... ah. Before. What's the other one?

"After," Yuui said. He's sitting in a corner of the bunk reading a novel on the handheld device, but he was stroking Fai's shoulder soothingly. "You're thinking of the concept of 'after,' Fai. Before and after, remember?"

"They're going to catch us," you said. Fai said. Says. Oh, names and dates and times, he used to understand. He remembers.

Yuui breathes out softly through his nose, barely perceptible. Fai sees. He saw most things, now, whether he wanted to or not. "So you've said."

Fai pushes himself up, off his belly, and anxiously curled against his twin. "The brown-eyed man -"

"_Syaoran_-"

"He was there, I saw him -"

"_Fai_. Syaoran has been on this ship for the last three years. He wasn't there, okay?"

Fai quiets, fiddles with the threads at the cuffs of Yuui's trousers. 'Syaoran' isn't what the man back then had called himself. He has... _had_ a label on then. _Specialist Sergeant_. It had been back with the needles in his eyes, scooping out the aqueous jelly. Upgrading it for service. _Something_. Fai doesn't... didn't know. He leans - leaned against Yuui, and his twin put an arm around his shoulders.

"I saw," Fai said, fretful. Yuui wasn't... he didn't know. That was okay. Fai had always done the knowing for them both. But...

"It's okay, Fai," Yuui said. "Syaoran's the pilot. He's not who you think he is, and he won't hurt you."

Fai turns this concept around in his (crowded) head, found it just made things more confusing. Why, he wants to ask - is asking? He's not sure - why would you put a man like that in the pilot's chair? The man with his military uniform and his breast label, _Special Sergeant Sagara Sousuke_- kind eyes are lies! Kind eyes are lies!

Yuui lets go of his electric book, both hands on Fai's shoulders. His body was stiff, forbidding, even as he made shushing noises. Fai realised he'd been shouting again with a lurch in his stomach and settled, gaze locked with his twin's sad, sympathetic one. "Calm down," Yuui said, with some urgency. "Don't _shout_, Fai, everyone else is sleeping..."

He speaks... spoke as if to a crazy person, in a hushed, patronizing tone of voice. Fai squinted at him. He's not crazy, he thinks.

"They want me back," Fai said, to remind him. "They want me back. They need me back - kind eyes . Specialist sergeant - they need me back there because, because I can, I'm worth, I can do things, they need me to see - I can't _stop_, Yuui, they -"

"Ssssh," said Yuui. "It's okay, it's okay. We escaped them, Fai. They'll never get you."

Fai can see it ahead of them, sleek and shining with reflected light. Waiting. Patient, but blind. "The _Mihara_might."

"I don't know what a Mihara is," Yuui said, fiercely, "But they can't have you either. I... I promise."

"They put things in my eyes," Fai says quietly. "Just so I could... I don't want to see, Yuui. Maybe if I - if I gave it back, they could -"

"What? Fai! No!" He had begun to rub at his eyes. Yuui's hands were strong around his wrists. _Kazuhiko made you that,_ Fai thinks, thought. _Before_.

He was starting to remember how before and after worked.

"Please don't do that," Yuui said, and he sounds distant. "I... I'll see if I can scrounge some optician's equipment on Europa, or if - if Kurogane knows anyplace likely to have some. But you can't scratch yourself, Fai. You'll hurt yourself. Promise me you won't, okay? Because if you keep on, I'll have to... to handcuff you or something, to stop you..."

"They tied me down," Fai says, and thinks of the stripper with the handcuffs again. Suddenly he recalled the tall dark man who had come into the cabin the day he met Sakura/Suu, whenever that was. Was that Kurogane? Were they his handcuffs? Who was he?

Yuui shook his wrists gently, jogging him away. "Fai?" he said, like he was waiting for something. Fai tried to remember. Had he been asked a question, asked to do something? Before was so muzzy. After was dark, but _Now_, now was the clearest of all.

"We're not safe," he said, and Yuui sighed softly. "They're waiting, I don't..."

He couldn't get them out of here. But maybe if he tried... maybe... they had wanted him to do something. Perhaps he could do it. Yuui was watching him with that sad, disappointed look, so Fai looks - looked away. Specialist Sergeant Sousuke was onboard, eating dinner in the galley and talking to Sakura-Suu; the tall dark man was in his cabin performing maintenance on a sword. And ahead of them was the Mihara.

He'd have to save them. The thought was startling clear, like a drop of icy water into the seething chaos of his head. None of them could See, not like he could. So he'd have to save them. But he couldn't... he couldn't tell them, _because_they couldn't See. So. He'd have to fix it himself, even if it was dangerous. He smiled at Yuui, who gave him a worn-down but genuine one in return.

"I think I want to read," he said. "Can I look at your book?"

Surprise flashed across Yuui's face. "My reader? Um..."

Fai says nothing, just watched. Yuui was frowning at the device. Eventually he sighed and tapped at the screen with the pad of his forefinger a few times, logging out of the shipboard network. This is something that makes sense to Fai. He watched as Yuui signed him into a guest account, stripped of administrator access to core data; he could change nothing, just view. For now that was acceptable.

There had been a Before and as always a Now, and even as the Now became the Before, Fai was beginning to see the shape of the After.

* * *

><p>Sakura stared at the new, blank entry in her vision journal. The empty fields stretched out in front of her, mocking her.<p>

Always start with the five W's, Yuui had instructed her. Who, what, when, where, and how. He'd made it sound so reasonable, so simple, like the world would always line up neatly into meaningful little packets like that.

Well, _where_ was simple enough. Sakura wrote, _Int'r Mokona shuttle. _She recognized that much. Her pen hesitated in the blank space beneath, tapping at the space left empty for her to write distinguishing details, things added or out of place. Yuui had been drilling her on that. He'd have her look at a scene, then close her eyes; while her eyes were closed, he'd change a few things (usually with his kinesis, so she couldn't hear him get up and move around) then have her open her eyes and tell him what had changed. It was harder than she'd thought it would be, but she was getting better.

The bland interior of Mokona's shuttle, unfortunately, stumped her. She didn't know it so well as the rest of the ship, and there was just nothing _there_ to _be_distinguishing. In the end she gave up, left that section blank and moved on to the next part.

_Who. _Just her. She'd been piloting the shuttle alone, and that was strange enough by itself. She knew how to pilot small spacecraft, of course - the driving age on Mars was fifteen, and everyone on Kurogane's crew had been trained in emergency procedures of all sorts - but in the three years since she and Syaoran had come onboard, she'd never once needed to take the shuttle anywhere by herself.

_When. _This part was hard. When Yuui had suggested putting calendars on every wall, Sakura had assumed her problems would be solved. Unfortunately, the Mokona's shuttle was one place where the projected displays did not reach. On the other hand, she'd been looking at the computer display, intently, in the vision. There ought to have been a timestamp on that screen, lost in the text somewhere. If only she could remember…

Sakura shut her eyes and lifted her chin, tilting her head back while she tried to concentrate, to bring the captured vision up before her mind's eye. Like the scene recognition exercises, Yuui had been drilling her on her detail memory. He'd set out sets of cards on the table, turning them over to give her brief glimpses before flipping them face-down and challenging her to find matches.

The exercise was similar enough to a game that Sakura had once played on the computer that she'd asked him why she couldn't just do her drills on one of the Mokona's consoles. She'd meant the question to be playful, but the look he'd given her had been completely serious. _There are some things that can't be done on computers, Sakura-chan,_ he'd told her. _You have to get out of the habit of letting the computer remember things for you. Your memory must be your own._

That was why he'd insisted that her vision journal be off the computer as well, an old-fashioned bound notebook of flimsy plastic sheets and an actual ink pen to go with them. It felt strange and awkward, but she was getting used to it, and somewhat to her surprise she discovered Yuui-san had been right: it was much easier to remember things she'd written down herself than things she'd looked up or recorded knowing that Mokona would store them for her.

But, like all of Yuui-san's lessons, the memory drills had been interrupted when Fai-san had woken up. More than a month had passed and he still wasn't well, still required all of Yuui-san's time and attention to caring for him. At least the poor man looked much better, all cleaned up and neatly dressed and with his hair clipped smartly. With good medicine and regular meals he was beginning to look a little less skeletally thin, his skin losing some of that awful pallor and his limbs steadying, losing some of that frightening twitch. But he still had trouble carrying on anything like a coherent conversation; he still couldn't focus well on his surroundings, still couldn't remember most of what anyone said to him. He clung to his brother constantly, and Yuui-san had not had time to continue their lessons.

Well, Sakura couldn't exactly expect him to neglect his own brother just to hold her hand through lessons. It was _her_ talent, _her _responsibility; he'd already shown her the right way to go about things. She'd just have to do her best on her own, that was all, and make him proud of her.

She frowned, her brows tightening as she tried to recall that one piece of the vision to mind. Suddenly, it blazed up before her, a red LED set of numbers. "That's it!" she exclaimed aloud, and hurried to write down the date and time before it escaped her again.

"What's it?" Syaoran's voice came, as the young man ducked his head through the hatch to look at her. "Princess, there you are! Er, I'm not interrupting, am I?"

"Oh -" Sakura found herself blushing, embarrassed at being caught talking to herself. "I'm just doing my, um, homework."

"Homework?" Syaoran looked blank for a moment before his expression cleared. "Oh, your precognition training!"

He said this with a mix of daunted reverence that Sakura found totally unwarranted, considering that all she was doing was racking her brains to write down the details of one little, insignificant vision. "Yes, but I'm a little stuck," she confessed sheepishly.

"I'm sorry to hear that. I know that Yuui-san..." Syaoran trailed off, and involuntarily the two of them glanced off in the direction of the twins' cabin. Syaoran climbed the rest of the way into the gallery, and lowered his voice. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

There probably wasn't, but Sakura didn't want him to go away. The issue of her talent had always been a wedge between them; she knew that he regarded her precognition with a sort of awed respect, as though it put her on a higher level than a non-esper like himself. But Sakura just felt uncomfortable and almost ashamed by his respect, as though she were deceiving him somehow. It wasn't like she had done anything to earn it - she was just _born_with this talent, nothing more. And nothing she could say had ever been able to convince him that it wasn't as useful or amazing as it sounded; it was mostly useless, boring and frustrating.

So if there was any way she could get Syaoran to stop treating her talent - and by extension _her_- like some awesome thing on a pedestal, Sakura was willing to give it a try. "Um - sure!" she said.

Syaoran's face lit up in a smile, and Sakura found herself beaming in return as he came and sat beside her on the couch. She turned the pad of paper towards him, and he frowned as he tilted his head to read it.

"Mokona's shuttle interior," he read aloud. "Date - hey, that's barely three weeks from now!"

"Yes," Sakura said. "We'll have arrived in Jovian space by then, so - this is probably something that happens there."

"Where, When, and Who," Syaoran ticked off the filled fields. "So I guess the next question is, what are you doing there?"

"I wish I knew!" The words came out with more vehemence than she would have liked, and Sakura tried to rein in her frustration. "I'm looking at a computer display in the shuttle. But it goes by too fast - I don't _know _what I'm doing!"

"Would it help to go down to the shuttle now?" Syaoran offered. "You could look at the screen and see if it reminds you..."

Sakura thought about it, chewing on her lip, but then shook her head. "I'd better not," she said fretfully. "I - I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between what I remember from the vision, and what I was seeing right in front of me. I just don't know!"

"Okay, okay," Syaoran said soothingly. Somehow, his hand found its way to the back of the couch, patting her shoulder gently. "Let's just look at this another way. Logically. There are only so many different kinds of displays that the Mokona's shuttle could have been showing, right? So let's start with that. Was it an inventory display, personnel directory, broadcast, game..."

Sakura shook her head to each one. "It was an astro plot," she said. "I - I couldn't tell you where, but it was definitely an astrography plot."

"So now we're getting somewhere," Syaoran said. "Were you traveling somewhere? Maybe from the Mokona to a station?"

"Maybe..." Sakura said doubtfully. It was logical, but... "There were - there were some things on the side of the screens. Algorithms - running some sort of countdown..."

"A tracking plot?" Syaoran the pilot suggested.

"Yes!" Sakura cried, the sudden certainty bursting like an explosion of euphoric certainty. "That's it, that's what it was! A tracking plot!"

"Wow!" Syaoran sat back, his ears turning pink, trying not to look too pleased at having come up with the answer. "What could you be tracking out there, though?"

Sakura shrugged slightly, as she blissfully wrote down 'tracking plot, local space' on her form. 'Running scan for - ?' "I'm afraid I really don't know," she said. "If there's any clues, it must be hidden in the..." She frowned, and tapped the end of the pen against the one remaining blank space.

"How it feels," Syaoran finished for her. "That's not much use, I agree. Well - again, let's look at it logically. There's only so many things that you _could _ be tracking out in deep space. If it's bad, it might be a bomb or a missile. If it's _good_, then it might be - I don't know, maybe some cargo or something? Maybe deep-space salvage?"

Deep space salvage was the dream of every cargo pilot, licensed or not. Every year, hundreds of ships hauled freight back and forth across the system; every year, a few never came back. Space was the ultimate storage locker - even if the ship had been destroyed and the crew killed, the cargo itself was theoretically still good and still retrievable. And according to intrasolar salvage tradition, whatever a pilot found was his by right. For that reason, ships of all sizes - including the Mokona - carried along apparatus for retrieving items from space and stowing them in their cargo bays.

Of course, just because deep space salvage was _possible_ didn't make it _likely_ - the sheer size of space meant that any lost vessel or cargo was a grain of sand lost on an entire desert _planet_. But still, the dream of lost treasure persisted. If it was indeed salvaged cargo in Sakura's visions, it would be an unquestionable boon for the crew of the Mokona.

Sakura stared unseeingly into the familiar space of the galley as she tried to concentrate on the feeling, or _aura _that accompanied each vision. Under Yuui's encouragement, she'd tried to develop a system - 'gold' for good, 'blue' for bad. Slowly, over time, the association of feelings with colors had grown stronger, giving each vision an unmistakable 'tint.' But this one was...

Red. A bright crimson around the edges, a strident vermilion curling and trembling from the outlines as if to a heartbeat. It wasn't bad _or_good that she felt, not exactly, it was... urgency. A frantic desperation, fear tangled with hope, as though there were one chance, one chance left in the universe...

"Princess?" Sakura blinked back to herself, jolted by the familiar nickname, to find that Syaoran's hand had migrated down her arm to clasp her fingers, curled in a loose embrace. She looked up to meet Syaoran's eyes, familiar and warm and brown.

"Whatever it is I'm tracking," Sakura said softly, "it's the most precious thing in the universe."

* * *

><p>Yuui was relieved to find Sakura in the gallery. Of course, in a ship this small there were only a limited number of places she could be - rec room, engine room, bridge or private quarters - but if she'd been working, or in her own private space, Yuui wouldn't have felt right intruding on her.<p>

As it was, he almost turned around and snuck out when he saw Sakura and Syaoran sitting together on the rec room couch, hands clasped and faces only inches apart. It was too late, though; they'd heard the hiss of the door as he entered and it was obvious from their guilty expressions and fidgets that the mood had been broken. Sakura coughed slightly. "Um, hello, Yuui-san," she said. "Syaoran was just helping me -"

"With her journal," Syaoran said hastily. "I was just helping her with her visions. Not to say that you couldn't help her better, of course -"

"No, I didn't say that -" Sakura objected.

"I'm sure you two were able to accomplish a great deal," Yuui assured the children. He felt a guilty twinge at the way he'd been neglecting Sakura-chan's lessons, but… there just wasn't _time_ for that any more. He had to focus on Fai, Fai who needed him, and he couldn't afford himself the luxury of indulging in outside relationships.

Which was why… "I was wondering if you could help me with something," he continued, getting to the point of the visit.

"Of course, Yuui-san," Sakura said. She glanced around. "Where's Fai?"

"Asleep," Yuui said, with a wry grimace. It was no wonder Sakura would ask. In the month and a half since Fai had awoken, Yuui had mostly asked for her help in staying with Fai while Yuui did something - had a shower, ate dinner, or just took an hour or so of exhausted sleep for himself. Sakura and Fai had really hit it off - he was biddable and calm in her presence, almost (but not quite) lucid and reasonable. Yuui hadn't been willing to risk him in Syaoran's presence again, not when he was still going on like he had been this morning. And the captain hadn't even darkened his door in weeks, Yuui thought, and tried not to let the thought be bitter. So he had no idea how Fai would react to the tall man.

He caught himself as his thoughts began to drift. The lack of sleep was really getting to him. Too much more of this and he would be as disconnected from reality as… Fai. He forced his mind back to the task at hand. "I hoped you could… do something else for me," he said, casting a helpless look at Syaoran.

The teenager got the message, and jumped to his feet. "I'll be up in the engine room if you need me," he promised, and shimmied his way down the hatch and out of sight. Once he had gone, Yuui checked to make sure that the doors had closed behind him, and came up to perch nervously at the end of the couch. He pulled the reason for his visit out of his pocket, and fiddled with it between his hands.

"I wondered if you could… cut my hair," Yuui said. "Like Fai's. Since you did such a good job on his," he added quickly.

Sakura looked briefly surprised by the request, but her expression quickly turned thoughtful. "Of course," she said. "That would explain…"

Yuui blinked. "What would it explain?" he said.

"Well, it's something I've seen in some of my visions," Sakura said. "At first I thought it might be Fai-san, but there were some where that didn't quite fit. Like being with me in the engine room, in zero gravity. But if it was _you_ with shorter hair, that would make more sense."

"Oh." Yuui sat back, feeling a bit disgruntled. Although logically he knew that it wasn't Sakura's fault - she couldn't control what she saw - he nonetheless felt irrationally peeved that _she_ had known about his decision to cut his hair before _he_ did. This wasn't a choice he was making easily, or lightly. It wasn't just some strands of hair he was cutting, it was bonds - bonds to people he couldn't be with, couldn't devote time to any more.

"It's kind of a shame, though," Sakura added. "Your hair is so pretty. But I guess I can understand. It's a lot of trouble to take care of in space - that's why most spacers have short hair, like me and Syaoran-kun."

_Kurogane likes it, too._ And had told him so, and had asked him to keep it long. Cutting it was an act of - not quite defiance, since Kurogane did not now and never would control him, but - contrariness, at the least. A drawing of boundaries.

Well, some boundaries needed to be drawn. Yuui made himself smile, and handed the scissors to Sakura. "I do appreciate this," he added, before he turned around and sat himself down on the floor before the sofa.

Sakura was a good cutter, her hands gentle and light as they smoothed strands of hair down across his scalp, lightly pulling sections taut before shearing the blades closed, a vibration and tug and sudden lightness as the hair sprang back. It was slightly curly when it was shorter, a curl not evident when its own weight pulled it close - but Yuui could see the curls perfectly well in his mind's eye even without a mirror, because he saw it in his brother's face every day. The only mirror he would ever need.

The door hissed, and Sakura and Yuui both glanced in its direction with surprise. The surprise grew into astonishment when a head of fair, white-blond hair peeked over the edge of the hatch, followed by Yuui's twin climbing quickly the rest of the way into the gallery.

"Fai-san?" Sakura said with some surprise.

"How did you get in here?" Yuui demanded. Although the doors to individual cabins could be locked or unlocked if the inhabitant desired, as basic security all doors on the Mokona were sealed when closed and could only be opened by a registered member of the crew. Yuui had been registered when he'd signed on board the Mokona, and his access had later been upgraded so he could open any door on the ship that wasn't locked or sealed by the Captain - but Fai had never been registered.

Fai gave his brother a look that said clearly that Yuui was the crazy one for asking such a question. "I flew, of course." After a beat, with Yuui and Sakura both staring at him, he clarified, "In a spaceship. How else?"

"Mokona?" Sakura raised her voice slightly, addressing the ship's AI. "The last person to enter the gallery - how did they gain access?"

Mokona's rabbit-like avatar flickered on screen. "Passenger Yuui Flowright has full access to nonrestricted areas," the toneless voice responded.

"Yes, I know _he_ does," Sakura said with some exasperation. "But I mean the other person - passenger Fai Flowright."

"Passenger Fai Flowright," Mokona recited. "Redirect passenger Yuui Flowright. Passenger Yuui Flowright has full access to nonrestricted areas."

Sakura groaned. "I think I see the problem," she said. "When you first came on board, Yuui-san, you gave us a different name. Remember?"

"Oh," Yuui said, feeling foolish. "Yes, I did."

"So we registered you in the system as Fai," Sakura explained. "Then when you told us later what your real name was, Syaoran went in and renamed your profile as Yuui Flowright. But 'Fai' still points to that file, and all the permissions were inherited."

"What, Mokona can't tell us apart?" Yuui's brows drew down, baffled. They looked outwardly similar, but modern biometric systems should have made it easy to distinguish between them. All of the doors at the Academy had been guarded by retina scanners, and even the oldest buildings had used fingerprint locks. "That doesn't make sense. Don't the doors on this ship have print locks, at least?"

"Um, no," Sakura said, giving Fai a worried look. "They have the option, I think - I'm pretty sure - but the Captain keeps them turned off. He doesn't like them, he says they slow him down. So most of the doors just use a basic bone-scan facial recognition program."

"You're not serious!" Yuui said with astonishment. He'd gotten the idea that Kurogane was something of a technical dinosaur, but this was just taking it to ridiculous levels. "Look, that shouldn't matter. Scans or no scans, any decent AI ought to have picked up on the fact that I'm already in here and Fai is a different person from me! She's a tenth-generation AI, isn't she? Aren't they supposed to be almost as good at interpreting context and intention as humans?"

Sakura made a face. "They are, _but,"_ she said, putting stress on the _but. _"Most of the comprehension programming assumes that they're going to be running with their personality cores turned on. When that's not enabled, a lot of the higher nuances get short-circuited. So when the captain took out her personality core..."

Yuui winced. "I see," he said.

"She's broken," Fai volunteered brightly. "Wouldn't it be better if she was a real person again? I can fix her. It's much easier to fix broken things than broken people." He wandered towards the nearest console. Yuui made an abortive movement to get up and grab him, but Sakura still had hold of his hair and he didn't want to stop with half a haircut.

Instead, he reached out with his power and gently tugged Fai back from the console. "Not now, Fai," he said. "She's not broken. The Captain likes her this way."

"I'll have Syaoran go in and make a separate profile for you later, Fai-san," Sakura offered, as she continued making careful snips of Yuui's hair. Fine, golden threads fell about him in a cloud, making the back of his neck itch.

Fai continued pushing towards the console, stretching out his arm, and Yuui pulled back a little more forcefully than he'd meant to. Fai suddenly whirled around to face them, and his face was distorted by anger. "It's not right!" he yelled.

"Fai, calm down," Yuui said, wincing at the volume of the shout. He shot an anxious glance at Sakura, but she didn't seem terribly shocked or frightened.

"Calm, calm, calm! They always want you to be calm!" Fai said, with an increasingly rising volume. "No thoughts! No feelings. That's just how they like it. Just do, do, do, and never _feel!"_

He must be talking about his own conditioning at the hands of the Feds, Yuui thought, and his heart twisted painfully inside his chest. "Fai, it's all right," he said. "Nobody here is going to do that to you. You can think and feel whatever you want. It's all right..." He held his arm open to Fai, encouraging him with another gentle tug of kinesis to come and sit by him, hoping to soothe his twin out of the fit of anger.

"No! Not me," Fai said, ignoring the outstretched hand with an angry jerk of his fist. "The _Mihara!"_

"What's he talking about?" Sakura asked Yuui. Yuui gritted his teeth. He thought Fai had finally gotten off this subject, after ranting about it for the better part of an hour this morning.

"I don't know," Yuui said. "Fai, calm down. There's not -"

"There _is,"_ Fai insisted, overriding Yuui's words. "There is. I've seen it. Can't you see it? Suu has - Suu has - Suu has _seen _it, haven't you?" He looked towards the girl appealingly.

"I'm not Suu," Sakura said, picking up immediately this time that Fai was mistaking her for the girl they'd once known at the Academy. "And I haven't - I haven't seen anything like you're talking about. Sorry."

"Suu's sorry, Suu's sorry - no!" Fai broke off, reaching up to press his palms against his face. "_Not_ Suu. She's not-Suu and she's sorry. Sorry. But you _have_seen it, right? You've seen it, the Mihara? Not-Suu?"

"Sorry about this," Yuui muttered to the girl, feeling irrationally embarrassed for Fai's behavior. It was one thing when it was just the two of them in their quarters, but he couldn't - he hated for other people to have to see it, the evidence of Fai acting so irrationally. "He's been obsessed with this topic all day. I don't know what he's talking about - I don't know of any ship called the Mihara, there was nothing like that back when we were at the Academy together. I don't know where he's getting this."

"I'm getting it because I _get _it," Fai interrupted, his tone emphatic. "Planning. An ambush. Where we're going. What's not to get?"

"You _know_ they can't, Fai!" Yuui said, trying not to let his frustration drive his voice up to match his twin's. "There's no docking facilities in Europa space that can handle heavy warships - every time they try to build one, the locals sabotage it. There can't _be_ any Fed battleships out there, and it would take them _months _to get out there! Anything small enough to make the trip faster than the Mokona would barely be a blip on our radar."

Sakura looked from one twin's face to the other, her expression uncertain. "Um," she said. "I - I haven't heard of anything called the Mihara either," she said. "But if you're asking if I've seen any visions about an ambush at Europa... well, I haven't seen anything like that. Everything I've seen is just normal, day-to-day things about the ship."

"See!" Yuui's voice held a note of weary triumph. "That's what I've been trying to tell you."

"But I don't see everything," Sakura quickly warned them. "It's possible that something could happen that I _haven't_ seen... but well, in terms of any of us being captured or killed, there's just no way that I could miss something that big. After all, before, when..." She trailed off, no doubt troubled by the reminder of her painful departure from her home planet. "I - I didn't actually ever _see _them coming for me - but I saw myself, after..."

"I understand," Yuui reassured her. "And of course, if that changed, you _would _tell us, right?"

Sakura nodded firmly, strands of hair bouncing about her face. "Of course!"

Fai's face fell. "You don't see," he muttered. His voice, previously loud enough that it nearly shook the bulkheads, dropped down to a mutter that Yuui had to strain to hear. Not that he particularly needed to, since it all seemed to be a variation on the same things he'd been babbling that morning. "It's not about... after. I don't mean after. It's about the _now. _She sees after... but not the now. I'm the only one..."

He was going on about _before_ and _after _again, Yuui realized helplessly. He needed to find some way to snap Fai out of it, to short-circuit this rambling loop he was getting trapped in. "Fai," he said sharply, and his brother's blue eyes fixed on him, blinking uncertainly.

He held out his arms again. "I need you," he said simply. "Come to me?"

Fai's expression lit up with happiness, and he made a beeline for the couch and plopped happily down next to Yuui. "Yuui," he said. "And Not-Suu. Don't worry. I'll take care of it. I _can _see, I can."

"I'm sure you can," Yuui said soothingly, and he put his arm around Fai's shoulders and rubbed his back. Fai cuddled against his side, and Yuui was torn between melting in relief against his twin, and weeping with the knowledge of what had been lost between them.

Not too long ago, Fai would have meant it when he told Yuui not to worry, that he'd take care of it. No doubt he still did, but that competence - that fighting spirit - had all been lost, shattered and muddled into incomprehensibility.

"Sorry about this," he muttered to Sakura again, rolling his eyes up to the limits of his vision to try to meet her eyes.

"Don't worry about it," Sakura said in a half-whisper, and then her small fingers released from his hair and she gave the top of his head a pat. She stood up, brushing cut strands of hair from his shoulders to the floor. "There, you're all evened up now. I'll go and get the hand-vac."

"Eh?" Fai turned to look at Yuui, his eyes piercing and searching, and he seemed to notice Yuui's haircut for the first time. "You did it!"

"I did what?" Yuui said, somewhat bemused by the abrupt shift of mood.

Fai raised his hands to cup Yuui's face, long, slender fingers brushing back through the newly shorn locks. They tickled. "You look like _us _again," he said happily.

Yuui couldn't speak through the lump in his throat; and it was just as well Sakura had gone to get the vacuum, since it let him grab his brother and hug him as tightly as he wanted to.

* * *

><p>Kurogane sat on the bridge, scrolling through lists of inventory and checking it against data dredged from the Europa mining station. Even though the colonies were tightly clustered, they'd save a lot on fuel if they didn't make a lot of unnecessary side trips. They'd need to restock on food and fuel as well as new armor plating to patch the ugly hole in the Mokona's hull; the repair nanobots had gotten their ship airtight again, but there was simply no way to fix a breach that big without the right materials on hand. At least the armor plates would be cheap out here so close to the heavy mining facilities.<p>

It was boring, tedious work - but paperwork was part of being a ship's captain, and Kurogane didn't neglect any of his responsibilities just because they weren't much fun. They'd be coming up on Europa fairly soon, so this couldn't be put off much longer.

The hatch sounded, and Kurogane's attention sharpened as the head that came up over the railing was blond - blond and _short, _fluffing out around the man's head in stubborn defiance of the full-gee field. For a suspicious moment he wondered if the crazy twin had made his way onto the bridge; but the body that made the little flip onto the bridge's gravity moved too gracefully for that. "Captain," Yuui said, a little out of breath, and the steady tone of his voice cemented it. "Good. You're here."

The question was, why would Yuui come up here? For the past few weeks they had rarely seen each other; there was no particular need for them to come into contact, but on a ship this size it was ludicrous that their paths wouldn't have crossed even once. Unless Yuui had been deliberately avoiding him and using Mokona to alert him to Kurogane's movements so that they wouldn't run into each other.

Yuui straightened and steadied himself in the new gravity field, and Kurogane's frown deepened as his gaze swept the other man from foot to head. "You cut your hair."

"Yes," Yuui said, and there was a touch of defiance in his voice. "I did."

Kurogane didn't much like the change. Not only was the loss of all that pretty golden fluff to be mourned by itself, but the change made him look even more like his brother. Given how starved and debilitated Fai looked, even now that he'd begun to recuperate some of his lost weight and condition, the similarity was not an improvement in Kurogane's book.

"Well," Yuui said at last, breaking the silence between them. "This is the first chance we've had to speak in a while, eh?"

"You've been avoiding me," Kurogane said pointedly.

"I..." Yuui looked away, hands fiddling with the back of the pilot's chair. "Well. I've been busy with Fai, mostly. He needs me." He shot Kurogane a pleading look, begging for understanding without having to ask out loud.

Kurogane wasn't about to let him get off that easy. "So what did you want to talk to me about?" he asked, folding his arms over his neck.

Yuui took a deep breath, and the shadows from the lights of the cockpit played over the lines and angles of his neck as he swallowed. "I've been thinking a lot, the past few days... About a lot of things, me and Fai, Earth, the Feds, and - a lot of things. But also about you. And me. And I think..." He looked up at Kurogane, his expression solemn. "I think we should break up."

It wasn't like Kurogane hadn't seen it coming, but it was still a slap in the face. "For fuck's sake!" he exploded. "Again with this hot and cold shit! Why is it so hard for you to figure out what the hell you're doing?"

Yuui flinched from Kurogane's anger, face pale, but held his ground. Finally he managed, "It took me this long to figure what what I needed to do," he said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have even mixed you up in this in the first place, but -

"So - all that happened before," Kurogane said savagely. "When you kissed me before, did you not mean it? That night in the infirmary, did you not want me near? Did you change your mind about wanting me?"

"What?" Yuui stared at him, blue eyes wide and shaken. "No! I mean - yes, of course I meant it, I -"

"If it's not you, then is it me?" Kurogane interrupted him, riding over him relentlessly. "Something I did, some line that I crossed? Have I done you wrong somehow without realizing it?"

"No, no!" Yuui protested, confused. "You haven't. It's not you, it's -"

"If it's not me, and it's not you," Kurogane said, "then what the _fuck _ is it? 'Cause whatever's between us only involves _you_ and _me!_ If you can give me one reason - _one _reason - why we should end this that has to do with either of us, then I'll accept it and say no more."

And Yuui stood there on the bridge, mouth opening and closing for a moment, and Kurogane felt a moment of satisfaction, bright and triumphant against his seething anger. _Thought so. You don't have one, do you?_

Finally Yuui cleared his throat and said, in a strained voice, "It - it's me. I just can't..._ do _this any more, Captain. I'm sorry. But Fai needs me now, and I just don't have anything left to give for you -"

"You've got a funny view of relationships," Kurogane said, "if the only thing you think they're about is _taking._ Maybe your brother is -" _an albatross,_ he thought, _a weight around your neck, a burden -_"an invalid," he said instead, "but I'm not. I don't need you chase after me all day and wipe my ass."

"Captain Kurogane," Yuui said in a low voice, his hands twisting into fists. "Please don't make this any harder than it is. My first priority has to be Fai - _has _to be, because he's my only family."

"Most other people can have relationships with their family and other people at the same time," Kurogane snapped. "What's wrong with you two that you can't even manage that?"

"Because we're not like _most people!"_ Yuui shouted. His face twisted with distress, and he turned away abruptly, hugging his arms across his chest and hiding his face from Kurogane. "We can never _be _like most people."

Kurogane stared at Yuui's quivering back, his mind racing. He'd assumed - from the way Yuui kissed, if nothing else - that the other man had been in other relationships before him, that he'd had experience with other people. But the way he was going about this - thinking of everything in terms of absolutes, all-or-nothing, ready to scorch the earth at the first sign of trouble - made it seem like he hadn't. So which was it?

If Fai were more together - if he'd been the one behind this sudden idea of Yuui's to terminate their relationship - Kurogane would have directed those angry suspicions his way. It was a sure sign of an unbalanced, unhealthy relationship if one half became controlling, demanding their partner cut off all contact with any outsiders due to jealousy or fear. But from what he'd seen of the traumatized blond, he still wasn't anything like that coherent. Which meant this dysfunction was all Yuui's.

That didn't make his part in this any easier.

"Sorry," he said at last, gruff and grudging, but sincere. "I guess maybe I was out of line."

"Just a bit," Yuui said stiffly, turning around again. He'd managed to paste a smile over his face, but his body language was still tense and tight, his arms wrapped tightly over his chest. "I'd expect nothing less from Captain Boundary Issues. The point is, whatever was between us - it's over."

"No. It's not," Kurogane snapped.

"Just so you know, throwing tantrums and ordering me around isn't doing much to change my mind," Yuui said with faux-brightness. "If you can't respect my decisions, then I've got no further business on this ship after Europa."

"What the hell do you take me for?" Kurogane snapped. "I'm not going to try to keep you on board against your will, or make you do anything you don't want to do. You _or _your precious brother, understand? Give me that much credit at least."

He turned and went towards the hatch, brushing against Yuui as he went; the blond rocked slightly, but stood stiff and still as Kurogane passed him. As he took hold of the top rung of the ladder, he added without turning around, "But I'll tell you something, blondie: this relationship does matter to me, even if it doesn't mean much to you. And I don't mean to give it up without a fight."

He slammed his way out into the corridor, and headed for his personal quarters, where Yuui couldn't follow him. He could use some time alone to cool down, practice his katas in the peace and quiet of his personal sanctuary.

Besides, if Yuui thought that running and hiding was the best way of dealing with his relationship troubles, see how he liked a taste of it for a change.

* * *

><p>It is dark. Not just in his cabin, but in other places too; except in Hong Kong, where it's midmorning. Fai can't see into Hong Kong so well. The Eurasian Federation military staff employ a lot of low-level clairvoyants as staff. He <em>knows <em>this. Clairvoyants cancel each other out. They are being told that. Were being told that, whatever. It's hard for them to see, but he watches carefully anyway, until Yuui shook him and said it was time for his pre-bed shots.

He hates the shots. They made him woozy, and he needed to be clear tonight. But if he doesn't have them he hurts, he knew that too. The hurting had started _before_, in front of not-Suu, the girl with the green eyes. Yuui isn't... wasn't there, and Fai _hurt_, so he had gone looking for his twin. Not physically, although he tries - tried that, too. But with his sight, which was easy enough. Yuui was in the bridge with the big scary man from before. They'd been arguing. Yuui was upset.

Fai hates the drugs. They slow his brain down. They make it hard to...

…. Oh, he can see, there in the window, a brilliant swirl. He's not aware of going to investigate but he stands there, hands pressed against the ship walls, nose to the glass, and _looks_. Sees a world with emerald grass and summer skies of blue and gold, moon rising over the horizon. Sea and forest and green. Things gone from his life.

"Fai? Fai, it's time for bed." Yuui is shaking him gently by the shoulder. "Come on, Fai, you've been standing at the window for nearly a quarter of an hour. There's nothing out there but space."

Yuui still doesn't understand. "There's a summer world," he says, "A forest and a beach."

"On Earth? Probably, but we're not going there anytime soon," Yuui says absently. He's sifting through the drawer underneath their bunk for their sleeping t-shirts and boxers. They don't have proper sleeping gear.

"Of course not Earth," Fai said scornfully. Earth is where people plot and hurt. "Out there. Out _there."_

Yuui looks up. "Well, there might be habitable planets in deep space, too, but it's ten years by cryo-sleep to any of the human colonies," he said in exasperation.

"Ten years nine months sixteen days twelve hours -"

"Yeah," Yuui says. Said. He dragged his wrist over his forehead, eyebrows pinched together. "That. Okay."

"If we were in cryo," Fai said. "I'd let you have the best pod."

Yuui glanced up at that and smiled, only it wasn't really a smile. The edge of his mouth twisted, but his eyes looked sad and distant. "And that's love, isn't it," he said, softly. He sounded like he was talking to someone else. Fai drifted over to him, touching Yuui's cheek with his fingers; Yuui covered his hand with his own, but Fai hardly noticed. There was another scattering of light over Yuui's shoulder, violet this time.

He came back to himself when Yuui gently but firmly pushed him backward until his knees collided with the edge of the bunk. The smile was gone from Yuui's face; his eyes were set and serious as he tugged at Fai's shirt, pulling it up and away from him. Fai let out a muffled protest as his arms were trapped, but Yuui was using his talent and cheating. The shirt came off despite him.

"You have to get dressed for bed," Yuui says/said. "You can't sleep naked, all right?"

Fai thinks about this. He seems to recall they used to sleep naked quite often, together, even. "Why not?"

Yuui hesitated, balling up the old t-shirt slowly, and then looks away. His eyes are soft and sad. "Because you're not you," he said, in a low voice, and then crossed the room to load the shirt into the laundry dispenser.

"I'm always me," Fai says. "I'm me and you're you. And the captain is full of anger."

Yuui glanced over his shoulder at him. "You noticed that, huh? He's... the captain. You - you won't be seeing much of him for a while. I promise, Fai."

"He's not going to try to keep us here," Fai said thoughtfully. Yuui started, and then gave him a long, thoughtful glance. "I wish..."

"What is it?" Yuui held out his hands and the clean shirt floats across the room into them neatly.

"You've got the fine control down good," Fai notes. He can't remember what he wished. A long time ago it was easy; he wanted a home and his Yuui, that was it. And a job that didn't leave them blistered and sore. For food. Now everything is blurry and jumbled and he can't _think. _Can't wish without thinking.

"Yeah," Yuui said. Once those words had made him glow with pride. Now he seemed sad, like Fai had said something wrong. "Come on, Fai. Time for bed."

"It's ten oh six in Hong Kong," Fai protests.

"We're not in Hong Kong anymore, Fai," Yuui says, sounding slightly frustrated, and Fai goes quiet, watching him carefully. Something changes - changed in Yuui's face at that. "I'm sorry, Fai, I didn't - I'm not mad at you or anything. Just... get changed. Do you need help again?"

Fai frowned down at the shirt. Sleeves are tricky and his hands were shaking. "Yes."

Yuui helped him get changed, which was easy, and then gave him the drugs, which wasn't. Fai didn't like needles, he has never liked needles, and he _hates _them now.

His twin was careful, though. And after he was finished, he taped a bandage over the injection site and then crouched down next to the bunk, pulling Fai's arm toward him to press a kiss to the crook of his elbow, a few centimeters off the bandage. Fai didn't remember that happening at the R&D centre.

Fai rather thought this meant he needed to kiss Yuui back, but when he leaned over Yuui stood up and took a few steps away, capping the needle with his back to Fai. "I'm sorry if this still leaves you hurting a little," he said. "We've got to decrease the doses bit by bit, to get you off the stuff. We're getting there."

"Yuui," Fai said. "Yuui, will you... I want..."

Yuui rubbed at his face with both hands and then tipped his head back, looking up at the ceiling. Fai followed his gaze and his eyes met space, he was zooming out and out and out into the deep blackness while the kilometers ticked by the millions out of the corner of his eye. Somewhere out there might be something, somewhere, if he kept looking long enough - Yuui had to shake his arm to get his attention.

Still, it was hard to hold a grudge when Yuui made him lie back under the blankets and then asked Mokona to turn the lights off. Yuui didn't sleep naked either, at least not now. He wears a t-shirt far too big for him. Borrowed off the captain.

"Are you angry at the captain?" Fai asked. They'd both looked pretty upset. Fai wasn't sure what the captain had said to Yuui, but if it was bad - if it was bad he would do_ something_. He knew martial arts.

"No," Yuui said, after a pause. "Did Sakura say something to you when you were with her today?" When Fai didn't answer, he sighs. "Sakura and Syaoran are good kids. They're just... bored. It's just gossip. Don't listen to them, Fai, me and the captain are just friends. That's all we are and all we will be."

"Friends are good. Friends help," Fai said agreeably. He angled his head to further press his nose into the crook of Yuui's neck, just behind his ear, and closed his eyes. Friends were good, but _machines _were better, so he needed... needs... either. "Good night, Yuui."

After a moment Yuui rolled onto his side and put an arm over Fai's hip. His lips, chapped and dry, brushed softly over Fai's forehead. Fai kept very still.

"I love you, Fai."

Well, he knew _that_. He kept his eyes closed and waited, and waited some more, and he is still waiting when Yuui finally drifts off, his breathing evening out in the steady rhythm Fai remembers from the couch and a ratty little apartment near the river.

Then he moves.

He wasn't an idiot; he checked on the ship's other occupants first. The captain was in his rooms, going through some katas. His movements were fluid and controlled, and he moved like Ginryuu was a part of him. It was a nice sword. Fai hadn't seen many better, and there were a lot flying around amidst the EFS high brass. The sergeant was in the engine room with not-Suu. They were playing music, taking advantage of the ship's inbuilt sound-baffling to keep from waking up the twins or disturbing the captain. His arm is around her waist and Fai kept half an eye on them as he gently began to work himself free of Yuui's sleeping embrace. Typical of the _sergeant_to hold people down and then dance with girls.

Well, Fai would see to it that they were safe from his machinations.

Yuui stirred when Fai began moving, but Fai knew Yuui, or had known him, had slipped away from him plenty of times when they were young. Fai knows what to do, to push and pull the right way, so that all the sleepiness goes to Yuui and all the wakefulness comes to him. Up till now the shots had made him too sleepy to try this but they didn't, tonight. Maybe he was getting better.

Thinking is becoming clearer.

He doesn't like to do this usually, because it feels unfair; but this is an emergency, Yuui won't listen to him and Fai knows. He doesn't know how long he has until the music and the dancing stop and the sergeant goes back to the bridge.

Fai knew he was going to regret it in the morning. It was easier to live in Now.

He stops only to pick up Yuui's jacket, a huge fluffy thing he got from the captain. It hangs past Fai's hands and off his shoulders and smells kind of musty. Fai's not sure he likes it. Yuui seems to, but then, Yuui seems fond of the captain. Nobody was in the corridor; he crept past the rec room, past the engine door. The friction matting was cold under his bare feet. Under the captain's room with its serpent door painting, undulating and twisting silver on silver. Toward the bridge. He had a goal.

The sergeant had too much control, he'd worked his influence upon the ship in unsavory ways, and Fai had to fix it. He had no choice. They (a confused, unspecified _they,_that could be the Sergeant or the Captain or some shadowy conglomerate of the two) had broken Mokona, had put their arms around not-Suu, had argued with Yuui and made him upset. As he approached the door leading up to the bridge he checked again on the other crew members; the captain was still doing his katas, only he'd taken his shirt off. Fai paused between one cold step and another, momentarily arrested by the sight of this. Not a bad view, Fai supposed; not at all.

He tore his mind and his Sight back to the sergeant and Not-Suu. They were dancing, fingers entwined, connected to each other and the wall by a single line from the sergeant's belthook. Not-Suu was smiling; _"We must look ridiculous!"_

"_Probably_," the sergeant said, with a grin. "_But Princess... do you mind?"_

Fai wished he had Yuui's talent. He'd've separated them, dealt with the sergeant himself by now. But he was alone, and he only had the Sight, so there wasn't a whole bunch he could do. Well. He could do more, but there would be _Shocks_, and anyway the universe was vast and -

He walked into the bridge room door face-first. He'd expected it to open for him, and hadn't seen it still in place until he'd been inches away.

"Provide identification," the AI said.

Her terminal next to the door had lit up; Fai covered his nose with one hand and squinted at it thoughtfully. It showed a person putting his thumb on the screen, then standing still and staring at a light just above the terminal. Ret scan? Print scan? Both?

Tentatively, he put his thumb on the screen. Mokona bleeped at him red rejection. _So_. They had acted, They had shut him out. They didn't want him interfering with Their plans.

Fai stepped back and squinted at the terminal. There was a light at the bottom, green and blue and gold, and he was filled with the curious urge to watch what it led to...

He forced himself out of it. He reached into a pocket of the fluffy jacket and found the reason he had brought it, besides the warmth and the making him look like Yuui from a distance; Yuui's handheld reader.

Fai opened the terminal's cover to reveal the complicated mess of wiring that made up most computers. Her chipboard was of an older make than he was used to, and it took him a moment to find the right cable. It was there in the end, hidden behind the panel itself, and he plugged it into the reader without any difficulty.

He could have transmitted the virus he'd built on Yuui's account, but that would have raised flags in the system. He'd spent most of the day using the reader to go over the Mokona's programs in read-only mode. The sergeant and the captain had two different approaches to writing code; the captain bulled ahead, puffing up his combat protocols with outdated and sometimes illegible languages (who used _python _in a combat protocol? Honestly.) The sergeant, by contrast, was neater but simpler. His code was tied off at the edges, if unimaginative. The sergeant's skill lay in his own intuitive knowledge and his use of his programs rather than any clever coding.

Still. Basic and unskilled as either of them were, they'd notice a virus. Even Mokona would notice, she wouldn't understand it was for her own good. So. No virus.

Besides, a virus wasn't always necessary. Not when the computer had such glaring weaknesses already built-in, left wide open by the absence of her core personality. The reader already had copies of Yuui's retinal scans, of his fingerprints. It was just a matter of convincing the computer that what was coming in from the read-port was data from the optical reader instead; that what the computer saw was what _he _wanted her to see...

The door slid open.

He'd never actually set foot on the bridge. He'd seen it before, of course, while spying on the sergeant; but the bridge itself was a new thing, a mystery, and he glanced around briefly when he stepped inside. There were rainbow edges around things, some ports and terminals stood out solid and heavy against the rest and he knew, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his belly, that he didn't have long at all until the rainbow edges became the walking roads.

He crossed to the main console and sat down. The keypad was rolled up and stowed , so he unrolled it and looked carefully at its keys; the sergeant had written - with _pen_- Cantonese characters over Japanese ones. After a moment of thought, Fai pressed the button that bore no characters but instead the Ichihara company logo of a white butterfly.

The screens unfurled in front of him, winking on one at a time, and after a second Mokona's avatar appeared on the dash; first as an image on one screen, then shining brighter as back-up lights appeared to cast her as a seemingly multi-dimensional hologram. Fai narrowed his eyes.

"Password," she said.

Well, that was easy. He'd watched the sergeant enter this earlier today, while he was looking for Yuui. He glanced down at the keypad and typed in 'zu beng hu'. He wondered what it meant; it wasn't proper Earth Cantonese. Probably Martian; their local dialects were nothing like his own when it came to idioms.

The Mokona's screens switched to the project Syaoran had been working on before bed; a mapping program for the shuttle, to help it make its way back to the ship. Fai glanced briefly through the code, saw six major errors that would cause the program to lock up, freeze or corrupt itself, and forced himself not to correct them. Instead, he dropped out of the GUI and down to the command level.

The captain couldn't have 'removed' Mokona's personality, he knew that even if Yuui didn't. You couldn't do that, not with an Ichihara model. The worst you could do was jailbreak them and partition off the part of the AI that covered emotional responses. The programming was usually sloppy and poorly constructed by part-time or amateur code writers, because nobody else would be stupid enough to cut out a vital segment of the AI. But people were old-fashioned, and after Suwa, well. Distrust of AIs was at its height and you could find programmers to do anything, if you wanted.

Rainbows, around the edges of Mokona's screen; a far-off asteroid field, drifting in perfect serenity...

He was gone ten minutes. Mokona's own clock told him that when he glanced back, and he could _feel_it in his head, his brain sluggish and slow - and the colors are spreading...

_I don't want to be this way, _ he thought. It was miserable and sad, but resigned. He raised a hand, tangling his fingers in his hair, and _yanked_- but it is too short, he can't get a grip. Desperately he cast a glance around, found the arm of the chair, and brought his palm down against it. The sound seemed to jolt some of the rainbows away, and with a plummeting feeling of relief in his chest he did it again, then three more times, chasing the colors back.

They'd return. He bent his head toward the computer and set to work. He has a lot to do. And there isn't much time.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	19. 16: purify and sanctify me

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

**Author's note: **As before, the drug information used in this chapter is 90% bullshit, so please do not take it seriously.

Many thanks in this chapter for the contributions of **uakari,** who was largely responsible for the last few scenes ever getting finished and not languishing forever in production.

**This chapter has been edited for FFnet's content restrictions.** To view the unedited version of the chapter, please go to (http reikah dreamwidth org 2012/06/10)

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><p>Syaoran was arguing with Mokona when Kurogane came in, which was unusual enough he paused in the doorway, watching his pilot carefully. Syaoran was half-out of his chair, hands spread flat over the dash; his eyebrows were drawn together as he jabbed at one of Mokona's HUDs with a gloved forefinger and said, "This is the sixth time!"<p>

"Mokona is programmed to merge duplicate files together," the AI said primly.

"They're not - well, I suppose they are duplicate, genetically speaking," Syaoran said, interrupting his own outburst with his own meticulous scholarly nature. "They must have matching genomes, since they're identical twins. But they need two different _files _, you stupid computer!"

"Mokona is programmed to merge duplicate files together."

Syaoran made a low, frustrated noise, running his hands through his hair, and Kurogane stepped into the room fully. "Having trouble?" he said, although it was obvious Syaoran was. He rarely raised his voice in irritation - had only done so a few times in all the years since he and his princess had come aboard. He had always said his twin had a temper short enough for the both of them.

"Captain," Syaoran said, with some relief. "Good, you know Mokona better than I do. I can't get her to stop folding the files for Yuui and Fai together."

"Hrn." Kurogane narrowed his eyes at the console as though it were a real thing. On the screen, Mokona's rabbity avatar sat motionless, awaiting orders. "So make a new one with a different name and fill it with false information. He won't be able to get into any of the secure locations anyway, since his prints don't match his brother's."

"Um," Syaoran said, awkwardly. "Well - that's the problem. We need to have _some_file on in order to calculate air circulation and life support. But as long as Mokona keeps merging the files together, then the child account will always have the same permissions as the parent one."

Kurogane thought of Fai, drifting and aimless; and then he thought of the rec room with its sharp edges, the engine room with its immense and fragile equipment, the bridge with its computers and Mokona's databanks.

That could be a problem. Kurogane came over to the dash and leaned toward it himself, Syaoran edging aside to let him have access to the terminal. "Show me passenger files dating from our last docking at the Earth orbital station."

Mokona obligingly opened up a folder on her left-most screen for him. One of her internal cameras had snapped Yuui in a rather unflattering position, stretching and trying to work the kinks out of his spine outside of his cabin door; judging from the length of his hair the picture had been taken the day he'd come aboard, after their argument and the revelation of his twin. His eyes were still red and puffy, even in the tiny image. Kurogane stroked his finger impatiently over the HUD, scrolling through boxes of text - height, weight, eye colour, code supporting Mokona's facial recognition software.

The problem was, as far as he could tell, that Yuui and Fai shared too many similar stats. He cursed again the blond's impulsive decision to cut his hair - even though he knew objectively that it was only a minor consideration for the computer, which was programmed to disregard minor cosmetic changes. People grew and cut their hair and changed their clothing all the time, and recognition software had to allow for those changes. That was why all the security-critical programs concentrated on unique features like retina scans, fingerprints and bone structure.

Even with those key differences - weight, fingerprint and retinal - the computer was simply scanning the first few megs of each file in her directory, and finding them identical, decided to merge them without comparing the rest of the data. It didn't help that Syaoran had set up "Fai" to redirect to "Yuui" in the directory structure, an association that would be a pain in the ass to break. And now that Fai's information had been in Yuui's file once, there was no way he was ever going to convince the computer that they weren't the same person.

He made several attempts to recreate and rename the profiles, getting steadily more irritated each time. He tried _Fay_ and _Fye_ and _Yuui_ and _YFlowright_ and _JohnDoe_ and _That Annoying Blond Bastard_, all to no avail. No matter what name he tried to give them, Mokona still insisted on treating the files as the same. He'd never been good at dealing with AIs, but this was stubborn even for her - it was like she didn't _want_to strip Fai's file of permissions for some reason. He sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, irritated.

"I think our best bet is just to wipe it and start over," he said. "We'll have to get that guy up onto the bridge to recreate his profile, and make sure that he doesn't bring his twin with him. For now I want to move all of our profiles - except that guy's - to a higher security level." He tapped out the appropriate code in the console, and Mokona flashed a scarlet warning message.

"Provide confirmation of identity," the computer's toneless voice requested. The cover slid back from a recessed panel beside the keyboard, containing the computer's biometric equipment. Kurogane leaned back and waved Syaoran forward.

"I haven't had to do this since I came aboard," Syaoran said, pulling his glove off and pressing his thumb down on the keypad. Mokona registered it with a bleep and then helpfully flashed instructions for the other thumb. The stick with the retinal scanner was already unfolding from amidst the bulk of her machinery, green light ready and waiting as Syaoran stood up and pressed his eye against it. Syaoran seemed unfazed by the machinery. "Sakura and I were terrified of this thing when we first came aboard. We thought you were turning us in, checking our IDs so you could claim a bounty."

Kurogane grunted. "You did it anyway," he said. "Why do that if you were so worried by the process?"

Syaoran gave him a weary smile. "We'd been running for months," he said. "We didn't have much energy. I'd flown surface craft back down on Mars, I guess I thought maybe I could steal the ship. I know now I couldn't! But I was just a kid back then."

Kurogane shook his head. Some might have mistaken the teenager in that bar for a kid, with his child's build and wiry limbs, his shortness and his voice, still a boy's voice; but Kurogane had seen his eyes and known, then, that this was no child. They'd come looking for a job and he'd offered one. He'd been lonely, up there on the ship with nobody but Mokona and chatter on radio stations - some he barely remembered, some new entirely - for company.

"When I saw the two of you," Kurogane said, slowly, "I was reminded of me. That's why I said I'd take you on."

"I reminded you of yourself?" Syaoran was looking at him keenly. "That's flattering, but I -"

Kurogane rolled his eyes. "Not _you_, brat. The little princess. She looked... out of place." He added in a low voice, more to himself than to Syaoran: "I've known what that's like."

"Oh." Syaoran deflated. "Well, I... Yes." A sudden light infused his eyes, and he glanced up sharply. "She's very strong. You know I call her _the princess_ because of a... a pun, of sorts. It doesn't work well translated. In Martian Cantonese slang, the name for an esper on the run is '_zhu beng hu_,' which translates as 'tiger in hiding.' But it's pronounced the same way as in the phrase '_gung zhu beng_,' which means 'Princess Syndrome.' You know, for a pretty girl who acts very regal and commanding. I thought... I just thought it fit her, somehow." He looked up at Kurogane and grinned sheepishly.

"Yeah," Kurogane said. "It does."

There was silence between them for a time, broken only by the subliminal background purr of Mokona's computers, lit by the multicolored LEDs of the bridge lights. When Syaoran broke the silence again, his voice was low and thoughtful.

"It's been really good, living here on the Mokona," he said. "I don't miss my family on Mars much at all, because... I have another family here. Do you think that Yuui-san will come back - I mean, do you think that Yuui-san will stay with us?"

He'd meant what he said the first time, Kurogane knew. It wasn't just him that Yuui had been running away from these past few weeks; he'd withdrawn from all of them, and Kurogane knew the children felt the lonely loss as much as he did. "After Europa? I dunno," he said, answering the letter of the question if not the spirit. "That's what he chartered us for originally, but I don't think he had any real idea what he was getting himself into."

Kurogane considered the rough, lawless atmosphere of the Jovian moons. True, he'd be out of Earth's power here - that was why half the population had wound up here, because this was a place where Earth's authority didn't reach. But that didn't make this place _safe_by any other measure.

Yuui could probably handle himself. Even if something in him itched maddeningly at the thought of letting the slight, pretty blonde go out among the wolves undefended, he knew better than that - Yuui was an exceptionally powerful kinetic, and anyone who tried to waylay him would found himself mashed into jelly without much problem. But could he take care of himself and take care of his brother at the same time? Kurogane had a bad feeling the answer was no; not with the way Yuui had been acting, throwing himself into caring for his brother's welfare at the cost of his own health and sanity. Europa was not a good place for the sick, the crazy or the broken. He hoped Yuui understood that.

"It's up to him," Kurogane said at last. "If he chooses to go, I can't stop him."

They were less than a week out from Europa. One way or another, Yuui was going to have to make up his mind soon.

* * *

><p>Light. He was sure he'd turned off the lights before going to sleep, but they were on again, glaring hatefully through his eyelashes. Yuui groaned, and turned on his side towards the inside of the bunk to shut out the light.<p>

"Yuui." Someone was shaking his shoulder. "Yuui, I fixed her. Wake up, I want to show you..."

"Five more minutes," he mumbled, giving a sleepy, awkward swat at those hands. He was so tired. It was a heaviness that seemed to sit in his bones, dragging him down into the foam padding of the mattress. He couldn't remember when he'd last been so tired, and he wasn't really sure why he was; he wasn't sick any more, he hadn't done a full day's hard work since coming on board.

"Yuui." The voice was more insistent now, right next to his ear. "Wake up. I want to show you something."

"Go 'way," he groaned, and slung his arm over his eyes. He took a deep breath - his chest ached with it - and exhaled, sinking slowly back down towards sleep.

There was a pause, then shifting and footsteps moving away.

Yuui dozed, drifting between sleep and waking - now that he'd been woken up he couldn't fully regain sleep, but he was too tired to rouse properly either. He heard the sound of a body moving around their small cabin, footsteps and rummaging and the soft knocking of plastic against plastic.

He came back to consciousness a little more a few minutes later, when the soft movements turned into a heavy _thud _and the clattering rumble of small objects falling onto the floor. But it was the next noise that brought him awake with a searing jolt: the dry, hacking sound of a person retching.

Yuui sat bolt upright in the bed, his eyes wide and staring as he looked around for Fai. His brother was leaning against the bulkhead on the opposite wall, one hand out to support himself while the other one wrapped tightly around his stomach. The smell of it hit Yuui - sour and metal and rancid - just as Fai doubled over and vomited again on the floor.

"Fai!" Yuui sprang off the bed and hurried to his brother's side, reaching out to support him as Fai's body heaved. "What's wrong? Are you sick?"

"I... I..." Fai raised his head, and Yuui's heart plummeted. Fai's face was flushed a bright red with the force of exertion, and his mouth was smeared with a trace of blood from where he'd bitten his lip. His blue eyes sparkled brightly with what looked like fever, and they were vague, unfocused. "Yuui, I think... I did something wrong..."

He spasmed again, his muscles bunching and jumping as he leaned over, coughing and retching. He spat something bright yellow-green, and Yuui realized to his horror that there was nothing left in his stomach by this point - he was bringing up pure acid. There was nothing he could have eaten that would have produced this violent of a response, and even a stomach flu shouldn't cause this...

Fai kept on twitching and spasming even after the convulsion ended, his arm jerking randomly against Yuui's grasp. Yuui moved his foot, and something crunched against the floor; he looked down and saw the broken remains of one of the syringes rolling unsteadily away, stopping against the puddle of vomit.

Cold fear shot through Yuui as the symptoms began to register on his mind. Seizing, vomiting, loss of coordination. Disorientation? With Fai, how could he tell? "Fai, what did you do?" Yuui choked out, panic squeezing his chest and throat. "Did you dose yourself? _Why?"_

"You were asleep," Fai mumbled, his voice nearly incoherent through his swollen lips and tongue. "Didn' wanna bother you..."

"Shit!" Yuui wrestled Fai across the room and sat him forcefully on the edge of the bed. He saw now the container that he'd been using to store Fai's medications, opened and dumped all over the floor. It had been locked and sealed - how had Fai even opened it? He could worry about that later, there were bigger problems at hand; with all the samples scattered and disarrayed over the floor, he wasn't even sure what drug Fai had taken.

Yuui dragged his hands across his face, racking his brains as he tried to call up the medical knowledge he had researched from Mokona, weeks ago. He couldn't have taken time-out, nausea and vomiting weren't symptoms of tropium overdose - no, more likely he'd just have gone to sleep and never woken up, and Yuui wouldn't have known until it was too late. What, then? Crash and Sleeper were both opioids, overdose could be treated with an injection of naloxene - but naloxene was derived from thebaine; if he'd taken that, then giving him naloxene could kill him...

"What did you take, Fai?" Yuui forced his voice to be calm, even while his shaking hands scrabbled in the medical case for the antitoxins. "Do you remember? Can you tell me?"

"I - I -" Fai tried to speak, but he was interrupted by another spasm of retching. With his limbs seizing uncontrollably, he was unable to lean forwards towards the floor; hot bile splashed over Yuui's chest, over the bed and sheets, and Fai choked and gasped as he inhaled some of it.

Mokona's infirmary would probably be equipped to deal with this, but Yuui would have to wrestle Fai down the ladder, through the corridors and into the infirmary while Fai was unable to even stand, let alone walk. He'd never be able to - no! How could he forget? He'd loaded the toxicity programs into this cabin's consoles on the first day. That had been designed to interface with the cryo-capsule which was gone now, but Mokona should still have all the information.

"Mokona!" he called out, hearing the edge of panic in his own voice that he couldn't quite suppress. The display came to light, Mokona's avatar appearing in its image. She didn't say anything, just waited.

"Mokona, Fai took something he shouldn't, I need you to help me!" Yuui said, trying to make Fai sit upright; his twin was stiff and unresponsive under his hands. "You know what substances he's addicted to - help me find out which one he took!"

Mokona said, "Mokona will need a blood sample."

The sampling needle was in the kit with all the meds, and thankfully its sterile seal hadn't been broken. Yuui grabbed the bulky cylindrical device, unscrewing the sterilizing cap; he pulled Fai's hand toward him, impatiently turning it over and stabbing his brother in the pad of his thumb. The device turned red and a light came on in its tiny screen. _Processing_, it read.

Fai coughed again, a ragged wet noise, and Yuui put an arm around him, anxiously tilting him forward and rubbing his back. How long had it been since Fai had taken... whatever it was? He'd been asleep, like a fool, he hadn't seen it. He should have woken up sooner - but how could he have _known_ that Fai would do something so _stupid!_

"Sonimen," Mokona said abruptly. "Patient That Annoying Blond Bastard (2) has a dangerous amount of the substance known as Sonimen in his body. Mokona suggests subdermal injection of 5cc naloxene to counter immediate effects and an immediate transfer to the infirmary to begin rapid detoxification protocols."

Yuui grabbed for the medical kit, scrambling through the tiny vials and compartments until he found the one packaged in bright red. The writing was tiny, almost incomprehensible, and he had to bring it up to his face in order to make out the words: _N-allyl oxymorphone naltrexone,_ he read. _Opioid antagonist. _With shaking hands, he fumbled open the plastic sealing a new, sterile syringe and fit the red cartridge into it. "Hold on, Fai," he whispered, juggling his twin around until he could take hold of his arm and push the hollow needle point into the meat of it. "This will help you. Mokona, how long will this take?" he added abruptly.

"Time to dissemination in subcutaneous injections is approximately seven minutes," Mokona announced, and a yellow timer helpfully blipped into existence on the screen beside her avatar.

The seconds seem to crawl by with excruciating slowness; Fai kept shaking and convulsing, and twice more vomited, each time having less and less to bring up except for a thick, burning liquid. But at last the counter-drug began to kick in; his breathing slowed and evened as his chest muscles loosened, and he began to relax into Yuui's arms. "The counteragent has taken effect," Mokona said unnecessarily. "Please transfer patient to the infirmary for further detoxification treatment."

Yuui breathed again, the panic loosening its clutching hold on his throat. "Thank god," he choked out. His eyes blurred with the rush of emotions, an overwhelming combination of relief and the fear and guilt he hadn't allowed himself to feel while Fai was in danger.

Now that Fai had stopped seizing Yuui was able to coax him to stand up, and loop his brother's arm over his shoulder so that he could stand up and walk. He managed to get them both down the ladder with a combination of careful coaxing and telekinesis, and started the long and shaky walk to the infirmary. The only blessing was that he met no one in the corridor; it was still early enough for the ship's lights to be in their night cycle, though they were slowly brightening with "dawn."

When they reached the infirmary, Mokona already had a treatment bed out and waiting for them; Yuui was thankful for her foresight as he loaded Fai onto it. His twin was going from 'calm' to 'somnolent' as the drug worked, and he didn't so much as protest the change in handling. He didn't object as Yuui peeled the stained and sweat-dampened t-shirt off him, so that the garment could be washed and Mokona could more easily monitor his vitals. Yuui fetched one of the pea-green heating blankets from the wall cabinet, remembering how cold he'd been when he'd been in here for treatment, and covered Fai up.

A mechanical arm hummed down towards the hospital bed, and Yuui eyed it warily. "What's that?" he said.

"Standard procedure for rapid detoxification stipulates that the patient be kept under anesthesia during the treatment to avoid unnecessary pain due to the effects of withdrawal," Mokona's toneless voice explained. "Now initiating the procedure on patient That Annoying Blond Bastard (2) -"

"Fai," Yuui interrupted. The designation had gone over his head in the cloud of frenzied anxiety before, but he could hardly ignore it the second time. "His name is _Fai._"

There was a pause, and then the motion of the arm resumed. "Patient Fai," she said. "As next of kin, your permission is required to proceed."

"Yes," Yuui managed to get out. "Just - do whatever you have to. Help him. _Fix _him."

If only it could be that easy, he thought wretchedly - and not without a faint bitterness. If only Fai could be fixed with the press of a button, or the prick of a needle; not just the drug addiction but whatever was wrong inside him. Whatever was broken that made him lash out at imagined fears and threats, break into medical cases and inject himself with drugs that he didn't even know what they were, while Yuui was sleeping not two meters away -

The infirmary suddenly seemed hot and close, reeking of disinfectant and bile. That last smell was coming from himself, he realized; he'd been splashed when Fai vomited on him, and he hadn't cleaned himself up yet. He rose shakily and headed towards the hatch, trusting the medical computers to do their work.

"Yuui," Mokona's voice came again, unexpectedly, as he reached for the hatch. "He'll be all right."

Yuui looked up, somewhat startled to be addressed. It wasn't like the computer to offer unsolicited commentary, let alone comfort - and despite the comforting words, the computer's tone was as flat and emotionless as always. "Thanks," he mumbled, and let himself down the ladder to the corridor beyond.

The ship was still quiet as Yuui stumbled back to their quarters, though the lights were now at their full 'day' brightness. The aftermath of the frantic last half hour was beginning to sink in, and Yuui found himself shaking with displaced reaction as he let himself back into their room.

And stopped, swaying on his feet as the stink of the room beyond hit him. Vomit was everywhere, in puddles on the floor and splashed over the bedding, marks and smears over the floor where Yuui had dragged Fai around. Broken glass and sharp metal glittered on the floor from where the overturned med-kit had been dropped and scattered. They couldn't afford to waste the medicine; Yuui was going to have to pick through the mess of bile and broken glass to find the containers that were still intact, wash them and stow them for future use. The bedding would have to be cleaned, as well as his clothes and Fai's, and they didn't have enough changes for both of them, and -

It was too much, it was just too much all at once. Yuui's back hit the wall of the tiny room, and he slid down to a sitting position as torrents of contradictory emotions - emotions too long suppressed - ripped through him. Guilt, for not taking care of Fai better. Anger, at Fai for being broken, for not getting better, for making Yuui give up so much. Misery, for losing the guiding presence that Fai had once been to him, for losing the sweet satisfaction of lessons with Sakura, for losing the strong comfort of Kurogane's arms. Helplessness, feeling that things would never get better, not if they stayed, not if they left, no matter where they went it would never ever ever get better, he would be trapped cleaning up after this shell of his brother for the rest of their lives -

He couldn't do this. That thought stuck out through the whirlwind of images and fears with an icy clarity. There was just too much for one man to handle alone. He forced himself to his feet, stumbled a few steps and nearly broke his neck plunging headlong out of the cabin into the corridor. The door hissed shut above him, closing the worst of the smell away, and Yuui stood breathing deeply of the cool ventilated air.

He was walking before he realized it, his feet taking over with the practiced kinetic's balance he'd developed over the months of living in these odd, twisty corridors. When he came to a stop he blinked, trying to clear his blurred vision, and found himself standing before the silver dragon decorating Kurogane's door.

* * *

><p>Kurogane always did his meditation exercises at dawn. It was traditional, even in space where "day" and "night" were purely artificial concepts. He'd been born on a station and his family had always been proud of their heritage, their link to old Earth Meiji-era families. It was an honor and a privilege to be given your own sword - the technological marvels that made the deadly weapons possible were not cheap. You had to prove yourself worthy, and he remembered how hard he had tried. Sword drills every day, studies at night, fencing with his father in the communal exercise room, all in the hopes of his father commissioning a sword just for him.<p>

Instead, he'd gotten Ginryuu. His father's sword.

Most hot katana nowadays were made for the spoiled scions of the _zaibatsu_, and they mostly were, in Kurogane's opinion, shoddy workmanship; with the loss of the old ways many of the crafters had moved on to other things, and most of the brats who claimed _Kajitori _to be their surname had a plain carbon-fibre blade welded to a hilt that bore their name in laser-etching. That was the extent of customization and crafting you could expect nowadays. Ginryuu was remarkable for her artisan's guard and sculpted pommel more than anything else; but it was her balance that made her so desirable. Even when she was running in cold mode, she was lethal. A sword like that needed to be respected, and so Kurogane did.

He wore a loose kimono and hakata made of lightweight sporting material as he practised the swings and strokes, flowing from kata to kata in the middle of his cabin. His feet were silent over the carpeting as he shifted and balanced. Muscle was no use without speed and agility, after all.

It was a routine so ingrained that he could do it without thinking; at the same time it let him lose himself in the familiar flow of motion and play of muscles without letting everyday worries and cares interfere. And so it was a mild shock when a noise unexpectedly pierced into his solitude; the door chime.

Kurogane paused, leg stretched out in mid-stance and Ginryuu held overhead in a two-handed, point-forward grip. That had definitely been his door chime, not the ship's intercom. What the hell? The kids weren't usually up this early in the "morning," especially not when he knew for a fact that Syaoran had been keeping Sakura company during her engine shift until 0100 last night. Which meant...

Kurogane sheathed Ginryuu carefully, never for one moment losing the mindful respect of holding such a blade, before striding over to his doorframe and hitting the button "You again," he said, unsurprised, when the portal slid open to reveal Yuui. "What is it?"

Yuui didn't say anything, but he didn't have to. Kurogane's nose wrinkled. "What the hell happened to you?"

"Fai," Yuui said, in a quiet, tired sort of voice. "I'm... I'm sorry, captain. You said once I could use your bath..."

"Yeah - " Kurogane said, staring. He'd almost forgotten that offer. "What the fuck did your brother do?"

"Threw up," Yuui said. "I... I couldn't get clean in that little bathroom, I -"

"He's sick?" Kurogane watched Yuui intently. "You left him alone?"

"He's out for now. He's in the infirmary."

Well, that didn't make things any better or more clear, but Kurogane stood aside from the doorway and waved him in. Yuui stepped past him gratefully, already looking around the cabin quickly; there were huge hollows under his eyes. "What's wrong with your brother? Aside from the obvious," Kurogane said.

Yuui paused at that, narrowing his eyes, and said, sharply, "There's nothing wrong with Fai. He was made the way he is. He'll get better, someday."

"You're not answering my question," Kurogane said suspiciously. "It's not like a virus could suddenly have gotten in the air supply."

"And you're very stubborn, Captain Scowly." Yuui rubbed his eyes, then sighed; reluctantly he dragged his eyes back to meet Kurogane's. The next words came out slowly, painfully, as though dragged by pliers. "Fai got - I had trouble waking up this morning; Fai wanted to... to show me something, but I fell asleep, and he... he broke into the crate I was using to keep his medicine in and... administered some to himself. He overdosed."

_Cripes. _Kurogane could picture it now. There were many things he could have said to that; like _you idiot_ or _why weren't you watching him?_ or even _Why the hell wasn't the box locked. _But Yuui looked rough enough that he could see the man had no doubt been beating himself up with those questions for a while already, and Kurogane didn't see the point in continuing to make him miserable.

"Bathroom's there," he said, jerking his head at the little door. "Dirty clothes go in the chute on the right. Mokona'll clean them while you're bathing."

"Thank you," Yuui gave him a brief smile. "I'm sorry, I - I know I shouldn't be asking favors from you, after the last time we spoke -"

"If you want to talk," Kurogane interrupted him brusquely, "Then let's do it when you're in the bath, 'cause the smell of you is getting a bit much."

A rapid raid of Kurogane's back cabinets turned up a spare set of towels and bath utensils - scrubber, bucket, handtowel, even a flimsy bathrobe monogrammed with the initials of some posh hotel, that he'd never used because it was way too short for him. He shoved them into Yuui's arms and pointed him towards the bathroom, taking up one end of his quarters. "In there," he growled. "Use the bucket before you run the bath, you know the drill? You don't want to be stewing in your own filth."

Yuui rolled his eyes. "I _have _used Eastern-style baths before," he said dryly, and Kurogane just snorted and stepped back. He opened the door to the bathroom - here in his private quarters, the locks would open only for him - and Yuui turned his slim shoulders sideways and slipped inside. The door wouldn't close for him with the lock still open, and Kurogane deliberately left it that way as he wandered back towards his interrupted morning routine.

He was unable to concentrate, though, with the faint noises of his unexpected guest echoing from the bathroom. He found himself unconsciously trying to match every faint noise to an action. Rustle, rustle, echoing thump; that was clothing hitting the floor, followed by the bucket. Some more scuffling... and then the metallic rattling of a hose being pulled out from the wall, _wait a moment -_

The grinding whir of a motor rose to life from the bathroom, followed by the winceworthy sound of the rotor catching and tangling on something - and a quite undignified yelp and a wail from his guest. Kurogane crossed the room to the bathroom in a few powerful strides, but by the time he shouldered through the doorway Yuui had managed to find the right switch to turn the vacuum off.

Yuui was standing in his bathroom, busy trying to disentangle his fine blond hair from the mouth of the vacuum. Just as well it hadn't been any longer, Kurogane thought. Yuui managed to extract himself and whirled to face his host. His face was flushed a bright pink, whether from the fright or discomfort or embarrassment (or all at once.) "Your shower tried to eat me!" he said indignantly.

"That's the vacuum," Kurogane said, fighting against the upwards twitch of his mouth. He jerked his thumb at another showerhead on a hose, on the far side of the tiled area. "The shower's over there."

"What? Why do you even have a vacuum in your bathroom?" Yuui demanded.

Kurogane gave him a long look, then snorted and shook his head. "Dirtboys," he said in disgust. "In case the ship loses gravity, d'you see? Got to have some way to get the water out of the air before it drowns you. Your bathroom has one too, but it's set in the wall so you never noticed."

"Oh." Yuui deflated. Self-consciousness returning, he draped the small towel over his hip and turned half away from Kurogane, half towards the sunken bath. "Um. Can you show me how to run this?"

Kurogane did, and while the hot water spun in torrents into the bath (small, like he'd warned Yuui before, barely a meter square - but deep enough to sit down in) he turned and left his guest to scrub up.

He kept half an ear on the sounds of splashing as he wandered around his apartment, but he heard no further mishaps. Gods, he needed to find something to do, something to occupy his hands and attention so he didn't just sit there, listening to the noises and resisting the urge to peek in on images to match the ones his mind wanted to conjure. He reached for Ginryuu, hefting her while he considered finishing his interrupted routine - but it wouldn't feel right to go through the motions while he was unable to concentrate on it, so he set the sword back in the rack in the wall.

Here and there was the inevitable detritus of living - a coat slung here, a few magazines tossed there, other clutter. A sudden uncharacteristic self-consciousness seized him, and Kurogane found himself moving quickly about his quarters, straightening up. He hadn't yet put away his futon from the night's sleep, and after a long hesitation, he left it on the floor.

"You keep this place so clean," a voice remarked from behind him, and Kurogane tensed, cursing himself for getting so distracted that he hadn't heard Yuui come out. He turned to face him, inhaling deeply through his nose to try to calm himself.

Yuui stood in the doorway to his bathroom with steam wafting out from behind him. His skin was pink and glowing from the heat, and the cheap white terrycloth of the bathrobe (even on Yuui it was indecently short, barely going down to midthigh) made his coloration even more striking. He left off toweling his hair dry, then draped the towel over his neck while he glanced around.

"You've been in here before," Kurogane said dryly, fighting back against this unexpected surge of self-consciousness. "Remember?"

The first night Yuui had kissed him. By the way his cheeks reddened even further, he certainly did remember. But, as usual, he ran away - his gaze slid away from Kurogane's, wandering about the room even as he took a few casual-seeming steps in Kurogane's directions. "I mean, but it's even cleaner than normal," he said. "As if you were going to get a General Inspection like the ones we got back at school."

"Did you have those often?" Kurogane fought to keep his voice neutral, not to let any of his personal feelings about Earth leak out into his voice.

"Pretty often." He must not have been as neutral as he'd hoped, because Yuui sounded oddly defensive. "It was - the instructors encouraged... discipline, and a clean room was part of that. It was easy for me to keep my things neat, but Fai... he never could clean up after himself."

Yuui began to wander in a circuit around the room; his hands rose frequently as if to touch something, then fell away. He seemed nervous, trying to run away even in such an enclosed space - but an invisible leash seemed to bring him up short, kept him from going too far away. "You know, I don't want you to get the wrong idea - I don't want you to think it was all bad," he blurted out, although Kurogane hadn't said anything of the kind. "We were - I was - happy there. People were strict, but... some of them were kind, too. I had friends - a lover..."

Kurogane's interest sharpened on this last point. _Lover,_ Yuui said, not _girlfriend. _"Oh?" he said, trying to sound casual and failing. "Who was he?"

Yuui flushed under Kurogane's intent gaze, and his reaction confirmed Kurogane's guess. Not that he'd had much reason to doubt it, with all the flirting Yuui had been doing since he came on board, but it was good to have confirmation. "N-no one important," he stuttered. He looked away, studying the bulkhead intently as though it were a viewscreen to another world. "I haven't... I haven't seen him in a long time now."

Kurogane frowned. "Not one of the instructors, was it?" he said, trying to pick out this strange melancholy hurt in Yuui's manner. "Preying on students -"

"No!" Yuui shook his head sharply. "It wasn't like that. The instructors, they never..." he groped for the word. "_Abused _us. Not them. They gave us everything we needed, just so long as we did what we were told..."

"Do you always do as you're told?" Kurogane asked quietly.

Yuui looked up at him, then away, and his expression was miserable. "I was never good at - thinking, or making plans," he muttered. "Fai was the one who made the plans - he was brilliant, you know, before... all this. I just - followed him. I... things never went right when I tried to do the planning." He laughed bitterly. "They still don't."

"You got the two of you this far," Kurogane said, but then he decided to take the opportunity presented. "Do you have any idea what you're going to do when you reach Europa? Do you have _any _idea how to handle yourself there?"

Yuui studied the floor, the compressed synthetic fibers woven and dyed to resemble the ancient earth _tatami _mats. "No," he confessed in a small voice. "I just know we - we can't ever let our guards down. We have to keep running..."

Kurogane took a step towards Yuui; the other man looked up at him quickly. "You can't keep running forever," he said in a low voice.

Yuui drew in a deep breath, hissing through his teeth. "I - it's all I know how to do," he said shakily. They weren't just talking about away from Earth any more, and they both knew it.

"Yeah. I'm figuring that out about you," Kurogane said. "You're gonna get caught eventually."

Yuui took a deep breath, and finally raised his eyes to meet Kurogane's. Kurogane was very close now, close enough that he could see the faint steam rising from Yuui's heated skin. Close enough that he could have captured Yuui in his arms, had he raised them. Yuui swallowed, and Kurogane saw the way his throat flexed and bobbed. "I don't know why you do this."

"Do what?" It was hard for Kurogane not to get lost in those fathomless blue eyes. That was the thing with the idiot; he could be so open - blushing, crying, stupid, _loud _one moment and then shut you out in an eyeblink. Kurogane found himself wondering if it was something this mystery lover had had to break through, too. If he ever had.

"Chase me," Yuui said. He didn't break eye contact. "You - you're loud and you're fierce and you're... not very patient, and I'm. I'm a coward. You know that. I'm going to keep on doing this, I'm going to keep running and hiding, and you know it, so why - why do you still want me?"

Kurogane took another step closer. Yuui had to tip his head back to meet his gaze now, but he was still holding it, and though his shoulders and hands twitched, like he wanted to back down, he wasn't. There was a kind of miserable confusion in his eyes, and Kurogane hesitated, just for a second; this mattered, he knew that, but he had never been the speaking type and he didn't know exactly what he should say. Yuui had said he was fierce, but in many ways Kurogane always felt... disarmed around him, for all his stupidity and cowardice and courage and smarts. He didn't know if it were possible for anyone to be more of a contradiction.

"Because I..." he trailed off. "You need someone to chase you. So I guess... I guess I'll be that guy. The one who chases you.."

Yuui's lips parted, just a little, and his eyes widened, and suddenly with an impulse Kurogane didn't fully understand, he bent his head and kissed him.

"I'm not gonna back down," he said, in a low, tight voice. "And you, you need to decide what you want and _take _it. Do you want to sleep with me?"

Yuui looked away. There was a pained expression on his face, like it was a truth he didn't want to admit, but his voice was steady and firm when he said, "Yes."

"Okay," Kurogane said. He kissed Yuui again, and he found his hands had risen despite himself; they were resting on Yuui's shoulders, thumbs slipped underneath the collar of the bathrobe. Yuui's skin was soft and warm, and he pushed the robe open a little more, revealing more of it; a triangle of paleness barely distinguishable from the white of the bathrobe. He was way too pale, Kurogane would never fully get over that; but when he put his thumb over the line of the man's collarbone the contrast in skin tones struck him.

Yuui stared at him, momentarily arrested. There was colour in his cheeks and his eyes were bright, surprised. He bit his lower lip, and then reached up, sliding a hand around the back of Kurogane's neck. Kurogane felt himself tense, instinctive combat reaction to someone, _anyone _touching that vulnerable spot, and this close to him there was no way Yuui missed it. His eyebrows lifted and then he smiled oddly and let go.

"Before we go any further," Kurogane growled, his voice roughening in an attempt to disguise his own discomfiture, "we're going to figure out exactly what we're doing. Are you going to be doing the fucking here, or am I?"

Yuui burst out laughing, and Kurogane scowled at him - it hadn't been _that_ funny. But it was a release of tension more than anything else, so Kurogane let it run its course. "Sorry," Yuui gasped when he wound down, wiping tears out of the corner of his eye. "Okay. I, uh, I've never... done that to anyone before. I've had it done _to_me, but that's... not really the same. I'd rather not..."

Kurogane shrugged. He didn't understand Yuui's reluctance to discuss the act by its proper name - what, he could do it but he couldn't talk about it? - but then again he didn't understand a lot about Yuui. He wasn't going to push it. Not now, anyway. "All right," he said. "Fine by me. So tell me - what do _you _want to do?"

"What do _I _want?" Yuui blinked, as though he'd never expected anyone to ask him that question, and then he took a sudden breath and blushed so hard that Kurogane was surprised his hair didn't catch on fire. "I, uh... I don't know..."

"Liar," Kurogane challenged him, but softly, softer than his usual. Yuui was practically thrumming with tension from head to toe - Kurogane had worked for years as a small-craft captain on the deep space routes and he'd _never _seen anyone who needed to get laid as badly as Yuui did right now. He was going to be completely impossible to work with until Kurogane got him to blow off some steam. "Out with it."

Yuui looked away, biting his lip, the color still high in his face. He looked fucking adorable, and Kurogane would have kissed him breathless again except it would have interrupted his chain of thought. He waited, holding onto his patience.

"I've never... well." Yuui swallowed, his throat bobbing, and licked his lips. With the sudden oral fixation Kurogane was halfway to guessing before Yuui said. "He never - I mean - I've never, well, had anybody else - you know - blow me."

Kurogane narrowed his eyes. That was a lot more vanilla than he'd expected from all the fidgeting and stumbling. "Your last lover wouldn't?" Jeez, how much of a selfish lout had this guy _been?_

"He tried once or twice. He didn't enjoy it. Actually, neither did I. I know that it had to be better than that because he liked it when I did it for him." Yuui was babbling - his normal camouflaging chatter on fast-forward. "But he could just never get the hang of it, somehow. You'd think it was rocket science... actually, rocket science he'd probably have understood better - his grades were always better than mine - "

Kurogane snorted at this. Rocket science it definitely wasn't, but practice went a long way. And that, well… He smoothed his hand further beneath the collar of the robe and around the curve of Yuui's shoulder, and tugged him gently forward. Yuui blinked back at him, maybe waiting for some subtle dig that wasn't going to come, but moved pliantly enough forward until his lips tickled against the hollow of Kurogane's throat.

"Does that mean," he chuckled nervously, "That Captain Rocket Man-"

"Don't even say it," Kurogane groaned and stooped to kiss away whatever other foolishness might have been working its way out of Yuui's mouth. His hand fumbled its way back out of the terrycloth folds and traced along the fuzzy lapel to the belt. It hung loosely enough around Yuui's waist to hook an index finger around it. He'd meant to pull it loose, but the fool had tied it securely (for all the good it was doing keeping him covered). Whatever. It worked just as well as a yoke to lead him by, and he could see his conspicuously unrolled bed out of the corner of his eye.

He broke away only as his heels pressed into the edge of the futon and savored the cool rush of air into his lungs as he settled himself down onto his knees. He tugged twice at the belt before Yuui snapped back to reality and joined him on the mattress, settling with his hands on Kurogane's kneecaps and his face centimeters away. The flush coloring his cheeks had spread to his chest, but his breathing seemed to have evened out and the nervous chatter had all but disappeared. Which made it somewhat surprising when he darted forward in the next moment to kiss Kurogane, but still left the captain's stomach doing loops in his abdomen.

Kurogane rumbled happily at the back of his throat and leaned in, slowly, gently easing them to the horizontal. "Ready for the next part?"

Yuui groaned, and hid his face in the pillow. "You've got to be kidding me," he moaned. "Give me a few minutes."

Kurogane snorted, and settled down on the mattress next to Yuui, tracing hand and eye over the appealing curve Yuui's body made on his futon - head and neck, back and ass and legs... This was not conducive to _giving him a few minutes_. Kurogane forced his hand away and settled back, looked up at the ceiling and tried to think cooling thoughts. Space routes. Astrogation. Ice-methane oceans.

Speaking of which...

"Hey," Kurogane said, his breath ghosting along the shell of Yuui's ear. "When we get to Europa..."

"Huh?" Yuui's eyes opened to slits, glazed and unfocused. Mention of their destination brought a bit more focus back into his eyes, thought, and he managed to make an effort to turn and prop himself up on his elbow so he could talk to Kurogane face to face. "What about it?"

"I don't..." Kurogane hesitated. "I don't want you to leave the ship."

A shadow crept over Yuui's eyes, and he turned his face away. "You've made your feelings clear on the matter," he retorted.

"That's not what I mean," Kurogane snapped. Maybe he shouldn't have brought this up now, he didn't want to start another fight... but there was no guarantee he'd be able to pin Yuui down again between now and then. "I mean... the station. Don't go out on it alone. If you're with me it'll probably be fine."

Yuui blinked and sat up a little straighter, going from elbow to hand as he stared down at Kurogane. "You think I need a babysitter?" he said incredulously.

"I mean it!" Kurogane blew out his breath. "This place... it isn't like Mars, friendly to espers and caught up in its own ideas of honor. Sure, there's no Fed cops on Europa station, but that doesn't mean it's safe. A kinetic as powerful as you, they might think to make a grab first and think later. I've told the princess the same thing. No going out on the station without me or the brat."

"Oh." Yuui subsided, looking a bit daunted. He turned away, lying flat back on the futon. His next words were so quiet, half-voiced, that even Kurogane's sharp ears could barely pick them up. "Is there nowhere we can go...?"

Kurogane sighed in exasperation and rolled onto his own back, wondering if he should even acknowledge that last. Instead, he found Yuui's hand, sandwiched between their sides, and twined their fingers together. He squeezed tightly, in a vain effort to be…comforting? He wasn't, strictly speaking, good at this sort of thing, which was why he'd- Why he'd- Oh fuck it anyway. "You cold?" he asked, squeezing Yuui's fingers again. He sat up halfway and fished around himself for the edge of a sheet or a blanket.

"No, I'm," Yuui sighed and managed a small smile, "I'm fine." He slinked an arm beneath Kurogane's shoulder to rest just below the blade and beckon him silently back down. "I mean it."

"So do I," Kurogane said with finality, and dropped back to the mattress. He wrestled an arm underneath the idiot and rolled him up to drape across his chest and straddle one thigh. There. His hands slid beneath the hem of the bathrobe – still dangling uselessly from Yuui's shoulders – and gripped his waist, fingers slipping closer into the dip of Yuui's spine as he craned his neck to kiss him again. He may have been useless with words, but at least he could manage this much. And the moron could take it or leave it – whatever he wanted.

For now at least, it appeared he would take it; Yuui broke away with a small chortle and laid his head to rest in the crook of Kurogane's neck, exhaling deeply. His arms, flexed into a semi-defensive posture from being heaved around like a ragdoll, flopped to the mattress and began tracing obtuse patterns into the sheets. "Sorry," he mumbled into the folds of Kurogane's kimono.

Kurogane sighed and kissed the crown of his head, wondering if maybe this wasn't the wrong way to go about things. "Idiot," he rumbled, "Just... _gah_." He balled his hand into a fist and dropped it playfully against Yuui's damned thick skull.

Yuui chuckled softly to himself, "You really are like him."

_Goddamn _it. Kurogane pulled a face and bopped him again, this time hard enough for Yuui to jerk his head up and rub at the impact site.

"It was a compliment," he insisted, hissing out his irritation.

"Not when you're in my bed, it isn't," Kurogane growled. He traced the pad of a thumb across Yuui's cheek, but continued to frown, "There's no room here for any former lovers. This ship is damn crowded enough with the five of us, without you dragging anyone else on board. Got that?"

Yuui tilted his head back and laughed – a dark, bitter sound – and Kurogane wondered for a moment if he'd crossed a line. But, the laughter faded into something much lighter with the passing seconds and Yuui raised his head to stare back at him.

Kurogane kissed him again before he had the chance to say anything stupid.

* * *

><p>Later. Yuui wasn't sure how much later. The lights in the cabin had dimmed automatically at some point; no doubt motion sensors built into the walls assumed that any occupant who stayed still for so long had fallen asleep. They began to come up again as Yuui moved quietly around the room, fetching his now-clean clothes from the laundry chute, and stepped towards the door.<p>

"You're leaving?" Kurogane's voice came from the futon. Yuui froze guiltily, then berated himself for his stupid reaction - did he really think he could sneak out without Kurogane noticing?

He took a deep breath and turned around, clutching his hot, chemical-smelling clothes against his chest. "Yeah," he said. "Our cabin's still a mess. I'd better go clean it up before Fai gets out of the infirmary."

Kurogane's eyes glinted at him from the shadows, piercingly red. Yuui fiddled guiltily with the sleeve of his pants leg; he was running away again, like he _knew_he would, and Kurogane knew it too...

"Fine," Kurogane said, and turned on his futon so his back was to the door.

Still feeling shaky and guilty, Yuui hurried through the corridors towards his own room. The mess was just as bad as he'd remembered, but he felt somewhat more up to dealing with it now. He mopped the floor, cleaned and reassembled the medkit, locking it with a doubly encrypted combination (and wondered just how much good that would do.) He ran the fans full blast until the lingering acid smell cleared from the room, and once all the scrubwork was done he changed into his own clean clothes and took Kurogane's stained robe to the laundry chute.

A look at one of the many clocks displayed on each wall told him it was past noon; yet somehow despite the early start this morning, and all the vigorous activity since then, he wasn't hungry. He headed for the infirmary instead, his feet dragging with a strange mix of anxiety and guilt. How could he face Fai after this?

He didn't have to. Fai was still asleep.

Yuui stood at his bedside for a long time, feeling the storm of emotions raging within him. Kurogane had sat at his bedside, just like this. Kurogane's body, moving over his on the futon. Fai -

Fai stirred, opened his eyes briefly to show a crack of cloudy blue. When he saw Yuui, he smiled. "Yuui," he slurred. He flopped one hand out weakly, the invitation clear. "C'mere."

Was it wrong to go from the arms of one lover into another's? It must be, somehow, but Yuui didn't have the strength to resist. He crawled into the narrow infirmary bed, nestling his body alongside Fai's under the warm green blanket. The bed really wasn't big enough for two grown men, but long years of practice had enabled them to fit two bodies together as one.

Perhaps the worst thing about what he'd done, Yuui thought as Fai pillowed his cheek on his collarbone and relaxed back into sleep with a small, soft noise; perhaps the worst thing was that he didn't feel bad about what he'd done at all. Maybe it was the post-orgasm glow. Maybe it was because it had been fucking years since he'd gotten laid. But - but mostly, he suspected, it was because it was with Kurogane .

He turned his head just a little, so that his face was against the crown of Fai's head. He smelled clean; maybe Mokona had gotten involved. He didn't know. He should have, but...

I keep swearing I'll stop, he thought. Can I?

Getting off the ship at Europa would solve his relationship issues with the captain. But Yuui was uncomfortable aware, here, now, still aching from Kurogane inside him, that he didn't really want to. Fai was warm and heavy and that had always been enough for him before, but the thought of stepping onto that station - of paying Kurogane for the travel and turning his back on him and Sakura and Syaoran and even the Mokona herself, with her twisting corridors...

"I've still got time," he said. Fai didn't respond, fast asleep, but the words were reassuring. He had time yet to choose, surely.

His body was warm and sated, and with that comforting thought, Yuui shifted to bring himself even closer to Fai - the way he had back home, so long ago and so far away, the narrow confines of the couch forcing them as close to each other as they wanted to be - and settled down to sleep. He should feel worse, but he didn't, and he was tired of feeling bad about not feeling bad enough.

Just for tonight, everything else could go hang.

* * *

><p>By evening, Fai was well enough to move from the infirmary back to their room, now freshly cleaned. He was still sleeping off the aftereffects of the anesthetic from the rapid detox treatment, and the post-treatment care instructions Mokona had flashed to his handheld warned him that he would probably sleep through the night.<p>

Yuui glanced towards the little program he had jury-rigged to tell him the captain's location within the Mokona - it had been invaluable when he was still trying to avoid the man. To his surprise, Kurogane was not in his quarters, as he usually was this time of day.

Instead, he was on the bridge. So were Syaoran - and Sakura.

What would have drawn them all to the bridge at this hour? If they wanted to hold a meeting, the gallery was a much more comfortable location. Curiosity got the better of him, and Yuui slipped on his ship socks and a clean shirt. With one more glance at Fai's peacefully sleeping face, Yuui let himself quietly out of their cabin and headed for the bridge.

As he climbed up the hatch towards the bridge, Yuui heard an unfamiliar female voice sounding through the bridge. Curiosity - and confusion - spiked, since this far out in open space the chances of encountering other vessels was slim to none.

The first one he saw on the bridge was Sakura - she wasn't at a station, only hanging around towards the back of the bridge. She gave him a quick little smile and wave, but didn't interrupt the female voice playing over the speakers. He sought out and found the vidscreen with the source of the voice, a blond woman of about thirty seated in front of a drab, unobtrusive background.

Syaoran and the Captain were each at their posts, also listening to the female voice, which was rattling off a series of names and locations that were unfamiliar to Yuui. Neither of them made any move to reply to the woman, and it dawned on Yuui that the transmission was a recording, not a conversation.

The pre-recorded recitation came to an end, and Kurogane leaned over and hit a button that froze the woman in midsmile. "You get all that, kid?" he asked

"Yes, Captain," Syaoran said, hands flying over his console. "I'm decrypting the package she sent along now. I'll have the course corrections laid in within the hour."

"No rush," Kurogane said, waving one hand as he leaned back in his chair. He was scowling, but Yuui was beginning to be able to read his expressions and thought he was more thoughtful than annoyed.

So he dared an interruption. "Who was that woman?" he asked.

Syaoran and Kurogane both looked up at him, but it was Syaoran who replied. "That was Karen Kasumi," he said. "She's director of operations on the Flower Garden station habitat. She's one of our contacts on Europa, so when she heard we were coming in she sent us a situation update personally."

"Europa?" Yuui echoed blankly. "But - we aren't anywhere near there, are we? I thought..."

"We're still a few hundred million klicks out," Sakura assured him. "That's why she sent a recording - there's enough of a time lag on transmissions to make real-time conversation annoying."

"I - didn't realize we were that close," Yuui said, taken aback by the sudden shifting of his worldview. He'd become so accustomed to the humdrum routine of life aboard the Mokona that he'd all but forgotten there was an end to this journey. Kurogane had questioned him about his plans at the end of the journey, but it had all seemed abstract, academic. Now it wasn't. What were they going to do? Fai wasn't ready - hell, _he _wasn't ready...

He looked up to see a pair of dark red eyes watching him intently. And remembered all the warnings Kurogane had given him.

"Five days," Kurogane told him with a quiet finality. "That's how long you've got to get your shit together. Got it?"

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	20. 17: a mystic new dimension

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapter seventeen was mostly written by me, and chapter eighteen was mostly written by her._

_Chapter 18 is in the beta stage, so it should be out within a few days._

* * *

><p>"Yuui-san," Sakura asked as she carefully did up her boots, tough synthetic leather on the outside and packed with fluffy white fiber filling that spilled out across the top. "Have you been to a lot of different places on Earth?"<p>

Yuui glanced up at her, a little surprised by the question. He was in the middle of coaxing Fai into a heavy coat, and his brother kept fussing and trying to push it off. Not that Yuui could blame him - in the carefully regulated temperature of Mokona's foredeck, the cold-weather garments were stiflingly hot and restrictive. But the others all assured him that once they got in the Europa elevator, they'd want those coats, and it was easier to wear them than to carry them.

"On Earth? I've been to a few," Yuui said, and a smile touched his face at some of the memories. "Fai and me were born in Hong Kong, as you know. We never traveled much when we were kids, but the academy we went to was quite far away - up in what used to be Siberia. From there on it seemed like we were shuffling around every year or so."

His smile faded. First the military academy, baking in the sunshine of the transformed tropical Siberia. Then, when his talent had been found out, shipped off to the psi academy in Macau. And while they had stayed enrolled there for three years, it seemed like not three months could pass without their kinesis class being taken out for some "special environmental training" or another in extreme conditions...

"Why do you ask?" Yuui said, pulling himself out of his thoughts with a blink. "We've been to a few different places on Earth, but that's the _only_place we've been. We've never been to all sorts of different planets or moons, or stations like you guys have on the Mokona. I'm sure you've seen many more different places than me."

For a moment Sakura didn't answer, stooping to pull the laces tight and tuck them down along her pants legs. She stood up and stamped on Mokona's friction-carpeted floors, and her face was brightly flushed. "I was just wondering," she said in a rush. "I had this vision, you see... it was a place I'd never been before, but I wondered if maybe it was some place that _you _knew. If it was a place on Earth."

Yuui had to blink a bit, bemused by the sheer lack of understanding of scale Sakura was displaying. "Well..." he said slowly. "Earth is huge, you know. It's an entire planet - well, so is Mars, I guess, but Earth is even bigger than Mars, and Mars isn't anywhere near as settled up as Earth. Even having been to only half a dozen places, there's almost no chance that I could have been to the place you saw in your vision." Yuui paused, his brain taking a moment to catch up with his mouth. Come to think of it, why would Sakura have seen a vision of Earth in the first place? "Are you sure it was Earth that you saw?"

"Well that's why I wanted to ask you," Sakura said, and Yuui recognized now the frustration and agitation in her voice. "Because I can't see how it _could_ be Earth, because it would take months just to get back to Earth from here even if we left today! But what else could it have been? We were outdoors, in a forest - and it wasn't any forest on Mars, I'm _sure_ of that! The dirt was the wrong color, all the dirt on Mars has at least a little iron that makes it red. And the trees were the wrong color, too. They were too green - almost blue-green. And the sun in the sky didn't look right for Mars. So that means it _must _have been Earth!"

"You know, the shinsengumi sector was originally said to be bad luck," Fai said, jumping into the conversation unexpectedly. He leaned against Yuui's arm, pulling his arm slyly back out of his coat sleeve. "Because the _shi _character was written the same way as for 'death.' That's why none of the investors wanted to go there, even if it was the closest."

"That's nice, Fai," Yuui said, absently pushing Fai's arm back into his sleeve, while his mind worried over the puzzle of Sakura's vision. "Did you see anything else?"

Sakura shook her head no, and Yuui breathed out softly. He'd never been to many 'natural' vistas before, not like she was describing. Hong Kong was nearly three hundred kilometres squared of pure city; even its parks were manmade and ornamental in a controlled sort of way. How far into the future had she seen? By trial and error over the past few months, they'd come to the conclusion that her range was about a month and a half. But she was right about the travel distances involved; even if they left for the inner solar system tomorrow, at max speed on a high-speed warship, they would just barely get back to Earth in that time.

The only logical sequence of events that could fit would be - if they were captured again and shipped home on a Fed warship. But then why would Sakura have seen them out in the open air, not in some grim Fed prison?

"But it's actually a very nice place," Fai was saying. "The fishing's not so good, but the plants are lovely. And the natives are a little scary, but nice. I wouldn't worry."

Yuui chewed on his lower lip, then sighed. "Let's not worry about it just yet, Sakura-chan," he told her. "If this is the first time you've had a vision like this, then it's probably still far off. Maybe you'll have some more visions that will help put it into some kind of context. Did you get a date and time?"

Sakura gave Yuui a fond, exasperated look. "We were _outside_," she said. "There were no calendars."

"Yes, and this is exactly what I told you about signal systems!" Yuui scolded her, and Fai nodded apparent agreement.

"Signal systems," he said. "Hair and clothes and pretty nails."

Sakura rolled her eyes slightly. "It was a Tuesday," she said. "All right? But I have no idea _which _Tuesday! Obviously my stupid system needs some work."

"Hey, are you guys ready yet?" Syaoran poked his head up through the hatch, the fleecy ruff of another of the cold-weather jackets level with the floor. "Need a hand?"

"No, we're just about ready," Yuui said, yanking the coat back on Fai one more time and giving the sleeves a sharp telekinetic tug to pull his arms through. Fai glared at him for the liberty, but Yuui was in too much of a hurry - and too distracted and anxious about Sakura's new vision - to pay him much mind. "Will there really be room for all of us in the shuttle?"

"It's either that or rent one of the flex-tubes to connect from the bay to the elevator," Syaoran said. "I've been in those a few times and they're a little unnerving... so the shuttle it is. Unless some of us want to stay on board."

"I don't think so," Yuui said, shuddering at the thought of the thin, flexible 'seal-tubes' that spacers sometimes used to construct a temporary travelway between two space installations that didn't normally connect. They were perfectly safe... in theory, but Yuui just didn't think he could handle the thought of having just that thin layer of plastic-carbon-fabric between him and the vacuum of space.

"Nanometres between us and the void," Fai said. "It could rip and spill us all out, and then we'd see, we'd see how far away we can travel..."

And as for leaving Fai behind on the Mokona... no. Just no. After the disaster with the meds a week ago, Yuui was hardly willing to let his brother out of his sight, let alone leave him unsupervised on a spaceship alone for a long period of time. Besides - they might well end up living here. Better for Fai to get used to the idea sooner than later, right? Right?

Yuui sighed. _First_ _**I'd**_ _better get used to the idea_, he thought.

The four of them piled down to the shuttle bay, where the captain was already waiting. Yuui gave him a quick smile, which Kurogane acknowledged with a nod but didn't return. The Mokona's shuttle _was_ a tight fit with the five of them in it, but as soon as they detached from the ship with a _clang _and swung off into empty space, Yuui forgot all about the tight, stifling confines of the shuttle and was lost in the vista before him.

The skies of Europa were black, studded with the clear unwavering gaze of the distant stars. Even the sun would hardly be brighter than one of those stars from this distance - or so Yuui was given to understand; the port side of Europa faced its parent planet, and for most of its four-day "year" around Jupiter the sun wouldn't even be visible.

Most of the light in the sky came from Jupiter itself, a round globe that hung directly overhead and took up half of the sky. It glowed like a streetlamp over a dark road, casting a warm sodium light over the filigree net of the Europa space docks. Yuui lost himself for several minutes just staring at it, feet planted wide for balance and head flung back, staring at the endless maelstrom of white and gold and brown and orange storms swirling silently over the planet's surface.

His eye caught a strange disturbance in the pattern, a small black fleck that seemed to track across the pale-topped clouds; after a moment of disorientation he realized that it was Europa's shadow, casting an eclipse as the moon passed between Jupiter and the sun. He shuddered and had to look away before he was lost in the sheer scale of the gas giant. Habit made him glance over at his twin, an automatic response to a new situation - checking to see what Fai thought. To his surprise, Fai was not staring at the scenery but instead looking at him, with a faint smile on his face.

"It's easy to get lost in it, isn't it?" Fai said knowingly.

That simple statement was more disquieting than it should be; one of them had to be sane. Unnerved, Yuui tore his gaze away from Fai's and looked back out the window. Although he had felt no change in direction or acceleration, the shuttle had swung away from the mesmerizing face of the planet above and headed towards the nearest planetary transit station.

The Europa space docks were nothing like the massive, ponderous, floating metal islands of the Earth - or even Mars - docks. Those had been huge chunks of metal, an aggregate of generations of space stations built around and on top of one another - a single giant spacebound city serving as an administrative and security center for all inbound and outbound traffic in Earth atmosphere. In contrast, the Europa space docks spread out in all directions for kilometers - a hundred tiny docks and ports and warehouses and repair shops and bars scattered across the Europa sky. Connecting strands wove a lattice that stretched out endlessly into the distance, shimmering with reflected orange light against the Stygian blackness. Each one of those 'strands' was ten meters of braided nanocarbon steel, Yuui knew; but at this height and distance they seemed as thin and flimsy as spider's silk. The berths and depots and mini-stations were strung out along the cables, little black cocoons tangled in the vast web.

No wonder the Feds had a hard time controlling this place, Yuui realized; it was so decentralized that no one single central authority would be placed to oversee it all. They would need a hundred battleships, and Europa simply didn't have - and refused to build - military facilities that could support such a force. It seemed incredibly disorganized and inefficient to build so many tiny stations instead of one, large central one, but if there were two things that the outer colonies had in abundance it was raw metal and fuel. They had an army of construction robots instead of soldiers, and once they got started those robots could build patient forests in the sky for a long, long time.

Below, the planet's surface was a pale white tinted yellow by the planetshine. It was smoother than he was used to seeing in planets and moons from this height, the sheer icy surface broken only by a crisscross of faint lines. Towering pillars a hundred kilometers high, not just one but half a dozen, plunged from their current vantage place into the moon's gravity well and disappeared under the surface. Those elevator shafts formed the link between undersea and sky, connecting the web of space ports with the mining operations far below.

They reached the elevator transfer station, and all piled out into the barren metal space as Syaoran negotiated with the computer for a temporary rental docking space for the Mokona's shuttle. The transfer station was a wide cylinder surrounding the elevator shaft, other transfer tunnels leading off spoke-like into the rest of the orbital network. From this angle most of the planet was cut off from their view overhead, but they could look out over the shipyards in its yellow light.

Automatically Yuui's eyes sought out the Mokona, searching for a familiar reference point among the new strangeness. He spotted her comfortable silhouette through one of the viewing ports, a few kilos away. His gaze sharpened intensely as flickers of movement caught his eye; a number of small robot-pods were swarming over the bulk of the ship from the dock.

"Hey," Yuui said, trying to keep the alarm from his voice. "Is someone trying to steal our ship?"

Kurogane came quickly to attention beside him and followed his gaze, but then relaxed. "Naw," he said. "That's just the port-bots. They start the water, oxygen and fuel transfers automatically upon docking - it's standard operating procedure for ships coming in from out-system."

"Oh," Yuui said, relieved and bewildered. "But don't you usually have to pay for that?"

"We already have," Syaoran chipped in, coming up on Yuui's other side to look out the window. "It's part of the docking fees. It's not cheap, but everyone on Europa understands that you can't get anywhere without fuel and oxygen on board. It goes without saying."

Just another piece of spacer culture that everyone except him (well, and Fai) seemed to understand. It only underscored the ever-present threat that lurked just beyond these thin, cold walls of glass and metal, threat that Yuui could usually put out of his mind but never quite forget. He shivered, despite the heavy bulk of their cold-weather garments.

Fortunately, a loud buzzer signaled the arrival of the car before Yuui could work himself into a further state of worry. The elevator cab had only a small panel for a window, offering nothing like the panoramic vista of the shuttle's viewscreens. It helped, a little, to not feel so exposed; Yuui felt emboldened enough to furtively peek out the window as the elevator dropped steadily towards Europa.

As they approached the surface, the illusion of perfectly smooth whiteness gave way to a jagged, sere landscape of carved ice. Rugged mountains and plains, sunken lakes and crystallized forests, all sculpted out of glittering ice and snow, gave the impression of a once-living planet that had been struck in time by a sudden frost that would never melt.

All this came and went in the blink of an eye, and then the surface rushed up at them and past them, and the cab plunged into icy darkness. The temperature of the cab's interior dropped, suddenly and noticeably, as the insulating vacuum of space surrounding them gave way to millions of tons of ice. Yuui saw the reason for the warm clothes at last, even as fans inside the elevator's interior roared into life, pumping out hot air in an attempt to keep the temperature steady.

After a few minutes, the icy grip eased as the cabin interior normalized a bit, and Yuui looked out the window again as curiosity overcame intimidation. There was not much to see; the lights of the cabin's interior threw itself futilely against a dark, green-black ocean and petered out after a few feet of smoky water.

"Is there really life on Europa?" Yuui said suddenly, the centuries-old question coming back to his mind.

"Oh, sure," Sakura said. "It's all microscopic, of course, but it is definitely life. About equivalent to the Cambrian era back on earth."

"Really?" Yuui said, obscurely disappointed.

"There's one prokaryote that grows in colonies large enough to reach the macroscopic scale. Europicus caldoramans chthonilus - I may be getting the name wrong," Syaoran apologized, "but the locals call them icebugs, mostly. Or ice barnacles - same thing."

"They're a pain in the ass," Kurogane said. "They get into the machinery and can clog up the gears, since they're attracted to the heat output of the moving parts. There's a whole sub-industry on the lower levels who make a living clearing out icebug infestations."

"Oh," Yuui said quietly, turning back to the screen. Bacteria and barnacles. Somehow, the glorious exploration of the galaxy wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

"We're coming up on the station soon," Kurogane announced, glancing at the readout panel.

"That was fast," Yuui remarked, mildly surprised. He glanced out the window again, but still saw nothing but swirling darkness.

"You can see it if you turn the EMR sensitivity way up," Sakura explained, leaning over to tap the panel by the window. The window darkened temporarily as a black grid of carbon fibers set into it activated, but then the panel cleared. The dark, murky water seemed to thin and vanish, until Yuui was looking out across what seemed like thin air - and gradually, specks of light began to appear in the distance, far away and far below.

"Karen's habitat is pretty high up - only about fifty klicks under the surface," Kurogane remarked. "They don't do any mining, so there's no reason to go any further down, and this way they aren't competing for space."

"What do they do, if they don't do any mining?" Yuui asked curiously. The slowly increasing shimmer of faraway lights out the window fascinated him - and one cluster of lights, at the very bottom edge of his vision, outshone all the rest. It grew slowly in size and brightness as they descended, gold and red lights shimmering in a symmetrical pattern. The lights pierced the void, but did not illuminate it; Yuui could only see the faintest shadowy outline of the nanosteel cable as it continued to trail far away into the depths. A brilliant lotus, floating at the top of a stalk hundreds of miles long.

He was so captivated by the beautiful sparkle of the approaching habitat that it took Yuui a moment to realize that no one had answered his question. He tore his attention away from the window and looked back at his companions. "I said, what do they do if not mining?" he repeated. "Do they trade in consumer goods for other miners then?"

"Umm... sort of," Syaoran hedged, and Yuui looked at him blankly. Sakura, to his surprise, was blushing.

Kurogane snorted, even as the descent slowed. "You'll see," he said.

The elevator car slowed to a halt, and the floor vibrated as the heavy car settled into place. Hydraulics clanked, and the cabin door trundled aside to reveal a bare, blue-lit loading bay with unfurnished steel walls.

"Through here," Kurogane said, beckoning them on. Yuui had to coax Fai out of the cabin into the little cavern; it was cold here, and damp, and their breath steamed in the air. The breathtaking scenery as well as the nervous excitement of finally reaching their destination filled Yuui with nervous energy, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on Fai; he had become less and less responsive the further down they went.

The elevator door clicked shut behind them, and went humming away up the shaft. Kurogane strode across the bay and punched a button by the steel doors; a buzzer sounded, and the blue light turned to white.

"We're clear," Kurogane said, and the door rolled aside to let them in.

A wave of color, bright lights and noise assaulted Yuui; he was nearly knocked off his feet by it. "Welcome!" called a chorus of voices from within, in the varying harmonies of a dozen different women. Yuui had to squint to focus against the dazzling glare, and couldn't help but gawk at what he saw.

Thick, plush carpets of a deep wine red color. Elaborate crystal chandeliers hanging from paneled ceilings overhead. Gold paint shone off the furniture, glittered off the walls, the bright white lights flashing back a thousand rainbow hues from the crystal architecture. Yuui realized after a dizzying moment that the decorations in planters on the floor and along the walls were glass and plastic imitation plants and flowers, growing in a crystalline riot of color.

The room before them was broad and round, arching to a dome overhead. In the center of the floor sat a large fountain, water burbling over half a dozen tiers. On each of the levels were little ledges, and women of all nationalities sat or lounged on padded cushions. Their costumes, like their coloring, varied... but very little of it left much to the imagination.

Off to the left Yuui saw a bright-lit stage; it seemed to be empty right now apart from an arrangement of athletic-looking bars and poles. A tableau of tables and chairs in front of the stage held yet more women, chatting casually with one another while smoking cigarettes. To the right sat a collection of green-felted tables; another pretty girl shuffled cards and handled chips across to a pair of men seated across from her, the only men Yuui saw anywhere in the room. Doorways were set at intervals around the perimeter of the room, blocked off from the room not with airlock doors but deep purple velvet cushions.

"Oh," he said weakly, as the clue dropped about what kind of work the Flower Garden did.

"Okay, kids, you know the drill," Kurogane said to them. "Stay here and wait a few in case _this_ one needs a tour of the station -" a jerk of head head indicated that Yuui was _this one_- "After that, you can do whatever the hell you like."

"Okay," Sakura and Syaoran chorused. They grinned at each other sheepishly; Sakura flushed faintly pink and broke eye contact first, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. "How long do you think you'll be?"

"Not long," Kurogane replied. "Here comes the owner now."

A blonde woman in a dark, floating dress came up to them, smiling charmingly. She looked somewhat familiar, and it took Yuui a moment to make the connection; this was the face he'd seen frozen over the communications screen a week ago. He ransacked his memory for the name, surely Sakura had dropped it - Karen Kasumi.

"Hey," Kurogane said gruffly, as the kids drifted away from their group and headed over toward the lounge doors, heads tilted toward each other. Yuui watched them go briefly, wondering where they were intending to do their shopping, and then reluctantly returned his attention to the woman from the comm link. "Been a while since we've been face-to-face."

"It's a long voyage out here, Captain Kurogane," the woman said. She glanced at Yuui and Fai, still smiling; but her eyes were sharp and appraising. Yuui got the impression that this was not someone to cross. "New crewmates, I see?"

Fai sagged heavily against Yuui, and Yuui had to grab his elbow to try to keep him on his feet. "Fai?" he said sharply, distracted all at once from the social duties set before him. "Fai, what's wrong?" He couldn't possibly have overdosed on anything again, could he? Or was there something in the environment, the gravity or the air or...

Yuui pressed frantic fingers against Fai's neck, trying to figure out what was wrong. Fai shuddered, not making a sound; his eyes were rolled back in his head, and his joints seemed to be locked. But his breathing and heart rate were even, if accelerated, showing no sign of deadly arrhythmia. He didn't seem feverishly hot, or dangerously cold, although his skin was sheened with a layer of sweat... stress? Could that really be all that was wrong?

Karen looked over at them with a frown. "Problems, captain?" she said, an edge creeping into her voice. "There are some kinds of troubleI don't need on my station."

"It's nothing like that, Karen," Kurogane said, and Yuui did a small double take - despite his worry for Fai - at the unaccustomed familiarity. Since when did Kurogane call anyone by their name - let alone their first name? "I'm not stupid enough to bring contaminants onto a habitat. It's all mental. Do you have a quiet room - one that's not currently occupied?"

Karen drew in a sharp breath, letting it out in a huff. "I know you wouldn't make a mistake like that - you're too much of a spacer for that," she said. "But there's more than one kind of trouble... all right, follow me. We'll talk in my office."

She turned and lead the way across the noisy, gaudy room, pulling aside one of the purple velvet drapes and beckoning for them to follow. There must have been something in the curtain besides normal cloth, because the noise level dropped almost to nothing as soon as they passed under it.

Beyond the curtain was a small, twisty series of corridors much more like one would expect to see on a space station - utilitarian, though not starkly so, this clearly was not part of the front they put up for customers. Karen's voice and retinal print let them into a large, cool, dimly lit office, and the familiar ease she displayed as she shucked her strappy heeled shoes and pulled a shawl from a coatrack to wrap around her spoke for how long she had made this her own space.

"There's a sofa in the breakroom in the back," Karen said, gesturing towards a flimsy plastic door. "He can stay there for as long as he needs to."

"Thank you," Yuui said, overwhelmed by gratitude. Fai had relaxed somewhat now that they were away from the noise and the press of people, although he was still unresponsive to Yuui's best efforts. "I can't tell you how much I appreciate it."

Karen shrugged. "The captain here is one of my best customers," she said wryly. "I like to help out when I can."

Best _customers_? Yuui's eyes widened and went to Kurogane, who shrugged irritably but refused to meet his eyes. "I keep my hands to myself and pay my tab on schedule," he said. "Basic courtesy. There's not much more to it."

"There's more to it than that and you know it," Karen said with a fond smile. "We have few enough allies out in this sector that I know not to take basic courtesy for granted - even if that really were all it was. It's rare and refreshing to find old-fashioned values such as yours, my friend."

"Best customer or not," Kurogane said, hooking out one of the chairs from the table with his foot and settling himself into it with a creak. "I was hoping that you could return the favor. I've got a load of cargo I need to offsell, and I hoped that you could take it off my hands."

Yuui recognized the beginning of a haggling session for what it was, and withdrew to the adjoining break room with wildly mixed feelings. Kurogane had been a customer, here? How often had he come by Europa, and stopped to pay a visit at the Flower Garden? Had he seen what was behind all those other velvet curtains? How many of the women upstairs had he fooled around with?

_It's none of your business, _he told himself furiously. Why shouldn't Kurogane see to his own needs, spending a lifetime shuttling between the stars with no one aboard his ship but a pair of teenagers? What business was it of his what Kurogane had done before Yuui and Fai had come aboard his ship?

The promised couch was lumpy and threadbare, but it was clean and long enough for Fai to lie down on. A little dispensary in the tiny room yielded water and tea, and he managed to get Fai to sit up long enough to drink some of the former and downed a scalding cup of the latter for himself.

Whatever was wrong with Fai, he wasn't getting any worse. His breathing was steady, albeit quicker than normal; when Yuui reached over and peeled back one of his eyelids his twin's pupil reacted to the light - sluggishly, but definitely a reaction. Yuui settled down on the end of the sofa with a deep sigh, holding his empty mug between both palms. It was still warm from the tea it had once held.

"Yuui," Fai said, after a while. He sounded slurred. Sleepy, maybe. "Yuui, we should... go. The stars..."

Yuui swallowed. "Well, we'll see," he said, keeping his voice light. "We reached Europa, Fai! That's the end of the line. If we're not safe here -"

He cut himself off, looking guiltily at his twin. Fai's eyes were both closed, but his brow was furrowed. He didn't speak again, and after a few seconds Yuui leaned over his twin and began pulling off the heavy spacer's coat. Fai didn't so much as resist, not even when Yuui pushed him around to work his arms out of the sleeves; it was much easier to get the coat off him than it had been to get him into it, and when he had worked it free Yuui draped it over his sleeping twin to serve as a blanket. It took longer to get himself under control, but when he thought he'd managed it, Yuui headed back out into the office.

If the tight hunch of Kurogane's shoulders and the clench of his teeth was anything to go by, the negotiations weren't going well. Yuui tried not to feel gratified by that. "I'm not saying I won't buy, Captain," Karen was saying, "but I can't give you more than thirty-five per unit."

"That's a load of crap," Kurogane exclaimed. "They're going for fifty on the station!"

"Then sell them on the station," Karen replied coolly. "If all I'm going to do is resell them through my own channels, I have to make a profit somewhere."

"Why would you be reselling them?" Yuui challenged her.

"None of the inhabitants of the Flower Garden are regular narcotics users, Mr. Flowright," Karen said as she turned towards him. "It's one of the conditions of living here. Apart from some limited medical applications, we have no use for large quantities of drugs."

"You run a brothel but you don't allow your workers to be addicted to drugs?" Yuui felt his own eyebrows climb. "No offense meant, Miz Kasumi, but that seems a bit..." He groped for a word. "Unprecedented," he finished.

Kurogane snorted, but Karen seemed more thinly amused than offended. "That is because, Mr. Flowright, contrary to how it may appear, prostitution is _not _the Flower Garden's primary purpose."

"Then what is?" Yuui said, taken off balance.

"Protection," Karen said bluntly. "There is no law on Europa, Mr. Flowright, except perhaps that might makes right, and the strong eat the weak until they themselves are eaten. I created the Garden with the intention of making a safe haven for the women here, who would otherwise found themselves powerless to defend themselves."

"Let me get this straight," Yuui said. "You created and ran a brothel - which by definition exists to sell out women's bodies - in order to protect them?"

"Precisely," Karen said, unperturbed. She was looking at him with her head tilted to one side, her eyes bright with a patronizing gleam. "About ninety percent of the population of Europa are male. Of the women, ninety percent of them live here. The rest are mostly the wives and families of the big shot mine owners and gang leaders, who can afford to surround themselves with bodyguards and security and have little interest in competing with us directly. That gives us a monopoly, of sorts, on the service we offer - and that gives us a certain amount of power."

"And I suppose you're not going to try to tell me that you don't also use your power to discourage competition?" Yuui shot back. He didn't know why he found the nature of Karen's business so... bleak; maybe it went back to what Fai had once said about their mother, that she had herself worked the world's oldest profession.

"Competition tends to discourage itself," Karen said in a dry voice. "As I said when I brought you down here, we do our best for our good customers. Those unwilling or unable to be good customers for us tend not to be good customers for anyone else, either. Every now and then, there's some enterprising young soul who tries to set up her own business on one of the other habitats. It never lasts long. Either they decide quickly that they'd be better off with us after all, or they leave - one way or another."

Her voice was as cold as the ice ocean outside, and Yuui shivered. Karen must have caught his expression, for her own softened.

"It is not such a terrible life here, compared to the alternatives," she said. "I make certain that none of my girls are abused, that our customers obey the rules. We stay on good terms - generally speaking - with the other habitats, and we have enough wealth and influence to keep up a fairly high standard of living. Given how many of my girls come here with their lives in pieces, for one reason or another, I think I do well by them."

"Speaking of which," Kurogane put in, "while you were checking on your brother, I told Karen that you might be a good candidate to work here, yourself."

Yuui sat bolt upright, his eyes widening as he stared at Kurogane. He couldn't possibly be suggesting - that after all this time, he'd keep his promise to deliver Yuui to Europa, only to sell him to a brothel?!

The corner of Kurogane's mouth quirked up at Yuui's response, despite his efforts to keep a straight face. "As a bouncer," he clarified. "Karen likes to use kinetics for her security - too many weapons would spoil the ambience. Plus they tend to discourage return business. But you're more than powerful enough to put the lid on any hot shot who gets violent, while still keeping them in good enough shape to report to work the next day."

"Oh." Yuui sat back, feeling both hugely relieved and more than a little stupid. Somehow, back on Earth when he'd been considering all the possible jobs he might take to earn enough money to support himself and Fai, he'd never considered taking a job as a whorehouse bouncer on a deep-space habitat.

"Not all of the inhabitants of the Flower Garden are whores, Mr. Flowright," Karen addressed him. "I don't require that any woman sell herself as a condition of living here, though many choose to take customers, for one reason or another of their own. My only requirements are that they must work for the benefit of the Garden as a whole. It takes a lot to keep a sealed habitat running, you know; and every service that we can provide for ourselves makes us a little less reliant on the outside world. We would be glad to have you, and I'm certain you would be valuable enough to earn room and board for your twin brother as well."

"I..." Yuui trailed off, at a loss for words. This was all coming at him too suddenly, he wasn't sure what to think. He'd never really thought beyond leaving the Mokona, knew that Kurogane had not wanted him to leave; and yet here, the captain was delivering a perfect job opportunity right into his lap? What was he supposed to make of that? Did the captain want them to leave, or to stay? Did he want to get rid of Fai more than he wanted to keep Yuui, or was he making this offer expecting that Yuui would refuse?

"It's just an offer," Kurogane added calmly. He turned his glass idly with his right hand, but his eyes were on Karen when he continued, "You'd get fair pay here, and it'd probably be safer for you than deep mining operations."

Suddenly Yuui wished he could talk to Fai, have Fai tell him what they should do... but not the Fai in the next room, unconscious on the sofa; the real Fai, the spikey, defensive, ferocious brother who had shielded him as best he could from a world in which they had been the underdogs. That Fai was out of reach, and the one he had left had gone near-catatonic just from being on this station. Would he get better, would he get more accustomed to the place? If not, Yuui couldn't see how they could possibly stay here permanently - but if not here, then where could they go? No other habitat on Europa was likely to be friendlier. Or was the Mokona the only option for them after all?

"I'll have to think about it," he said at last, and wished he didn't sound so weak. "I'll... want to look at other options, of course."

"Of course," Karen said, and her voice was expressionless enough that Yuui couldn't tell if she was mocking him or not. "The Captain tells me that you'll be docked here for a few days at the least, while your ship is repaired and refueled. There's no rush."

"You should find the kids and take a look around," Kurogane added lazily. "They know their ways around. This'll be your first deep-Solar colony; you should get to grips with the layout."

Yuui bit back his first response, that he had survived just fine on the Mokona, and nodded. Karen smiled at him, an enigmatic smile that revealed nothing. "You should be quite safe on the Flower Garden," she said, "But I would avoid the other habitats for now. Mining stations are no place for tourists, and someone there might put two and two together, Mr Fluorite; the EF telepaths broadcast a description of you and your brother a few months ago when you first left the planet, and not everyone forgets in a hurry."

The EF telepaths, of course. The network of telepaths stationed throughout the solar system, always talking, always sharing information. Even the fastest radio signal had delays this far out, but the 'paths could communicate instantly if they were strong enough. Yuui wondered briefly if his old classmates from the psi academy had been the ones to send the broadcast - if it had been Ran to take his seat in the Broadcast Needle that loomed above the Macau Psi Academy - and cut that train of thought off.

"Be back here in three hours," Kurogane said, glancing at the clock display on the wall. He caught Yuui's eyes and nodded towards the room next door where Fai lay delirious. "I'll look after things here." Yuui breathed in deeply, held the filtered manufactured air in the back of his throat, and nodded.

"Just keep an eye out, and don't buy anything that requires a payment plan," Kurogane called out behind him as he walked away, and Yuui rolled his eyes, trying to fight back the blush that wanted to rise at being addressed like a child. So new was he to this strange new world, that he might as well be.

If he... and Fai... were to be living here it would behoove him to know his way around, he thought, as he pushed the door open. The noises and scents and colors of the Flower Garden assailed him again, and he went looking for Syaoran and Sakura.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	21. 18: speed up to burn out mode

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

Author's Notes: _This fic is being cowritten with **Reikah**. Chapter seventeen was mostly written by me, and chapter eighteen was mostly written by her._

* * *

><p>The kids were waiting for him outside the lounge. Syaoran had his coat back on, but the toggles were unfastened, and he was leaning against the straight steel wall. A man twice as big as he, almost as huge as Kurogane, had materialized from out of seemingly nowhere and was now standing patiently next to the entrance to Karen's complex; his long blond hair was pulled into a scraggly ponytail and he wore heavy dun cold weather gear, including a scarf that covered his mouth and nose and a hat pulled down low so all Yuui could see of his face was his eyes. The bouncer eyed him over, but satisfied that Yuui was leaving, did not make any other movement.<p>

"That was quick," Sakura said, coming up to him. She tilted her head to one side and frowned at him. "Where's Fai-san?"

"With the Captain," Yuui reassured her. He shifted his weight to his other hip, glancing warily around the chilly steel loading bay. "They're still working out the value of... of the cargo."

"Did Karen offer you a job?" Syaoran wanted to know, and Yuui raised his eyebrows. The kid didn't really look all that ashamed. "Captain Kurogane said he would speak to her about it. It'd be a really good idea, Yuui-san."

"So he said," Yuui said, with a light, polite smile. He could not entirely express how much he didn't want these two children encouraging him to work as a brothel security enforcer. Sakura must have sensed some of this, for she quickly changed the subject, seizing his elbow in both her pink mittened hands and beginning to tow him over towards the shiny doors of the elevator shaft. Yuui didn't think this one was the one they had left through, which meant they must be going to another habitat, a guess confirmed by Sakura a moment later.

"It's another elevator ride to the marketplace," she said. "It's safe there, almost as safe as at Karen's. The market mercs won't tolerate violence."

Yuui squinted at her, confused. "Mercenaries?"

"It's what they're called," she said, with a shrug. "You have to remember the way Europa started out, Yuui-san. Six different mining corporations bought grants out here. They imported their prisoners from all over... ERK hired out of Russian prisons, United Energy from American, Six Stars from Zimbabwe and so on... nobody here really likes each other. But the market and Karen's place are neutral territories, Karen's because she hires bouncers, the market because the sellers hire their own mercenaries."

"Karen's bouncers will throw you out, and maybe very unkindly depending on what you did to her girls," Syaoran continued anxiously, "But the marketplace has its own laws, and if you violate Europan market laws, the market mercenaries will carry out... justice. And not the kind with a legal system and fair representation."

"They have a firing range there," Sakura continued quietly. "It's not used much anymore, or at least, not in all the time we've been coming and going from Europa... but it used to be."

Yuui frowned. "These laws -"

"Don't steal from, threaten, kill or otherwise inflict injury upon a vendor," Syaoran interjected helpfully. "And don't take out grievances on other shoppers on the market floor. They don't care if you do it outside, but there's no violence in the market. It's fairly easy to stay within the rules."

That seemed reasonable enough to Yuui, though the thought of a mercenary police force wasn't one he relished. He had a sudden brisk mental image of some young brave pointing a weapon at a vendor; of men in black body armor pinning the fool down, dragging him over to a corner of the market where the walls were stained brown and red...

"We have a pretty large shopping list this time, don't we?" Sakura was asking brightly, her face turned toward Syaoran. He grimaced.

"You have the internal shopping list, but the biggest priority for me as far as I know is to replace the outer plates we lost in that dogfight. That'll take me hours to get done, unless we want to pay _double _for the labor."

Sakura reached up with her mittened hand, pushing a strand of hair under her hood. "Well, tell you what - why don't we all three go to the marketplace, but we'll find the processed ship hardware seller first, and you can go start your repairs?"

Syaoran frowned. "Kurogane always said not to leave you alone in the market, Princess," he said, but Sakura just scowled.

"I'm not a little girl," she said, with a trace of huffiness. "I'm - well, you know what I can see, and I haven't seen myself being kidnapped in the marketplace. Anyway, Yuui-san will be with me, and if I'm not safe with someone with _his_gifts I'm not going to be safe at all."

Yuui couldn't keep from grinning. "Well said, Sakura-chan," he said cheerfully, and she turned and beamed proudly at him over her shoulder.

They didn't have to summon the marketplace elevator; it was already making its way toward them. When it stopped they had to stand aside from the doors to let its four passengers exit, and once inside the car Yuui stared back at the strange Europan men in their thick heavy coats as they made their way, in an orderly fashion, to Karen's bouncer, queuing to show him their IDs and be admitted into her perfumed halls. Would that be his job, he wondered, or would he be working inside? It was _cold _out there in the elevator lobby, a coldness that only spiked as the car doors closed and the elevator undocked.

"The miners won't be carrying any obvious insignia in the marketplace, but it's very important you don't confuse the groups with each other," Syaoran said, rubbing his gloved hands together. "The outer clothing style is a giveaway, but really, it's best to try not to try to work out which miner works for which company. It shouldn't come up unless something goes wrong. If you call a Six Stars miner a Shan-zhe... well, they'll be waiting for you when you leave."

Sakura pulled a face. "We get some slack because we're in-Solars," she said matter-of-factly, and grinned at Yuui's mystified expression. "It's what the Jovian colonies call everybody who lives between Jupiter and the Sun. It's not really a derogatory term, although sometimes they use it like it is."

"It's an English pun," Yuui guessed slowly. "In-Solar... Insular?"

Syaoran shrugged. "My English isn't great, but that sounds about right? The words sound similar anyway. Did you speak English at home, Yuui-san?"

Yuui swallowed and smiled, but it was a small thing. "Sometimes," he said, and something in his face must have given away that it was a sore topic, for Syaoran dropped his gaze and moved to gaze out the elevator window.

There were two men waiting for their elevator to dock, and they shoved themselves inside as soon as the door opened without giving any of the current passengers a chance to leave; Syaoran and Sakura seemed to have been expecting it, because they didn't make to leave the car until the men had claimed a space at the railing around the edge of it. Irate, Yuui stepped out after the kids, brushing at his shoulder where one of the men had barged him. It was much busier - and warmer - in this lobby; there were six elevator mouths, one of which was substantially larger than the others.

"We're in the red corner," Syaoran said, checking the wall marking quickly. "That means these elevators connect to a couple mining habitats, two straight quarry facilities, Karen's garden and the big one goes right up to the surface. We'll have to take the stairs up to the plate vendor.."

Sakura was pulling her hood back and stripping off her mittens with her teeth; this done she balled the mittens up with each other, shoved them into her pocket, and began unzipping the coat. "It gets hot in the market," she said warningly when she caught Yuui watching her, and he quickly copied her lead, twisting his coat and zipping it up the way she showed him to make a neat self-contained backpack. That done, the three of them made their way into a small manual steel door, with a handle and a sign in multiple languages urging users to PULL, and obeyed the instructions to pile into the market.

It was at least twice the size of Karen's habitat in floorspace, domed with a second walkway tier running around the edges of the dome. Irregularly spaced spiral staircases connected the second tier with the ground, and everywhere signs were hung; some neon, some printed, others blockily lettered in dark substances that didn't look like ink. "MEAT," read a sign on the second floor above their head in English. Under the printed title, six small emblems Yuui recognized as belonging to the mining corporations were printed, as if to say the seller was endorsed by all six companies. Elsewhere he saw some old, _old_Russian, like he'd still seen on the more ancient buildings in Siberia before the Earth-bound Russians switched at the EFS' directive to writing their alphabet in Chinese characters; on yet another sign FUEL was printed six times in different languages each time. A stall to their left advertised proudly that it sold GUNS AND EROTICA; a stall further down sold alcohol, needles and thread, and religious icons all at once.

"How is anybody supposed to find anything here?" Yuui asked, dazed, and Sakura chuckled.

"Mostly you just walk around," she said. "You can spend all day here - there are places to sleep overnight. Shopping here isn't a daily trip for the miners. It takes at least six hours in one of those elevator cars to travel from the best habitats, down deep close to where the work is, so people come up here to spend their weeks off. One Europan week is under four Earth days, so they work five in a row then get one off, usually. The red entrance we just left is one of eight lobbies."

Syaoran stretched his arms above his head and nodded. "That's where we want to go," he said, "The one on the second tier with the sign of the lightning bolt - that's the parts supplier. We've used her before. She's crooked, but not excessively so."

Yuui could see the lightning sign above them, behind a stall that let shoppers come in and rent a commset to watch the 'latest Earth & Martian soap operas'. It looked as grungy as stalls in this crowded hall came, and Yuui took a step back, shading his eyes with one hand to see if he could see any merchandise from here. It didn't seem likely, and he lowered his hand and began to remark on this when he realized Syaoran and Sakura had already begun making their way there, and were several meters away from him, threading effortlessly through shoppers. Yuui hurried after them, cursing under his breath.

He'd known markets back on Hong Kong; there had been one not too far from the squalid tenement block in which he'd grown up. There, the stallholders had barked constantly to draw your attention, and the shoppers themselves had mostly browsed in silence, creating the perfect conditions for a telekinetic thief to snatch him and his twin up some morsels while the vendors were distracted. The Europan sellers, by contrast, seemed almost somnolent to his Hong Kong senses; they sat back in stools or on chairs, arms folded and eyes lidded lazily, watching as shoppers came and browsed their goods and called out to them. "How much for this movie?" Yuui heard as he edged his way around a stall displaying a great deal of pornographic films. "How much for this one?" "How much for six of them?"

Each stall seemed to have at least five customers browsing its wares, calling out price requests to the merchants or asking if he (and there were no women in evidence) had any specific goods. People were shouting over each other, and how the vendors could keep all the voices straight Yuui could only guess to be practice. Ahead of him Sakura's pink coat-turned-backpack stuck out like a beacon, bobbing in between men in nearly identical dull earth-colored jackets, and he quickened his pace past vendors selling fabrics, folded blankets, dingy second-hand video game consoles, boxes and boxes of cigarettes, razor sharp hunting knives, chipped plates, hats - the items began to blur together, the voices rising in pitch, and as Yuui darted around another shouting unmoving customer he thought, _I've been on the Mokona so long, this is like being on an alien planet._

Karen's enclosure had been much quieter, but Yuui doubted it stayed that way at all times; he had noticed the stage with its poles and curtains. He thought of his brother on Karen's sofa, still and limp, and with a sudden bolt of protectiveness decided he'd not bring Fai out to the marketplace - not like he was. And he'd have to ask Karen if - if he did accept the job, if there could be more soundproofing, because surely this, this overwhelming susurration of noise and pressing humanity... this must be what had been bothering Fai.

"There you are," Sakura said to him apologetically when he reached the two of them at the bottom of the staircase up. "I'm sorry Yuui-san, I forgot you're new to the market. We'll just get these plates ordered and then we can look around, if you like."

The vendor was a thin woman with a nose like a beak. She wore a pin on her shoulder, quite prominently, of a snarling panther head crossed with an old musket-type gun; when she saw them she sniffed. "I remember you," she said to Syaoran. "You were with that big bastard what does jobs for Kasumi."

"Hello, ma'am," Syaoran replied, which made her scoff.

"If you're being paid to deliver a message from Kasumi, you can tell her to shove it," the woman said. "I didn't marry Boss Iksyan for no reason, you know, his boys keep me totally safe. I ain't going up in them gardens."

Sakura shook her head. "We're looking for outer hull plating for our ship," she said, and that seemed to concentrate the woman's attention. She pulled an old-style tablet out from under the desk in front of her, smacked it into its docking station (hammering it in with a few blows of her palm when it refused to connect at first) and switched on the keyboard.

"How thick?" she said, all business, and Syaoran leaned over the desk to look at the blueprints unfurling on the tablet screen.

"Thicker than that. And that. And that. No, keep going... uh-huh. No. No. No."

"You pirates?" the woman queried, pausing her scrolling through models. "You're after some proper plating here, you planning on getting into a fight?"

"Smugglers," said Syaoran, with an honesty that made Yuui's eyebrows rise. It seemed to relax the seller, though; she nodded thoughtfully and flipped through.

"You don't want too thick, slows you down. If you ain't pirates then you want more speed than survival, specially with this bloody ghost fed ship that's supposed to be going around out there."

Syaoran stiffened. He wasn't the only one. The back of Yuui's neck broke out in a sweat, and beside him Sakura stood up straighter, her fingers curling into a loose fist. "A fed ship? Here?" Syaoran demanded, maybe too sharply; the woman glanced up at him and gave him a long sly look.

"Maybe," she said. "I ain't seen it. Neither has me hubbie, nor any of his boys. Some of them Six Stars boys swore up and down they seen it though, when they was freighting the fuel ships in."

"They didn't get a positive I.D?" Syaoran's eyes were fiercely bright; the woman's expression became speculative, and she leaned back in her seat and folded her arms over her chest.

"Seems to me you got some extra interest in this ship," she said. "You're still here, so you prolly ain't loaded up on contraband from this little moon yet, which means you been runnin' stuff out here, near as I can tell."

"Nothing but pharmaceuticals from Mars," said Syaoran. "And it's all legitimate, we have receipts."

The woman rolled her eyes and looked past him, piercingly, at Sakura. Her mouth worked, and then she said, "Seems like the feds is increasin' pressure on the gifted nowadays, not just on Mars. I heard they was askin' questions at Ganymede. Those soft bastards practically rolled over and gave up; six telepaths, handed over, just as easy as you please."

"Ganymede? But -" Sakura's mouth thinned. "But Earth has no claim to anybody on one of the Jupiter mining colonies, and nobody here can possibly have committed crimes against Earth for it to apply for extradition. Why would Ganymede give up their 'paths? It's not like Earth could run one of their battleships out here, not for long. They'd run out of fuel and time."

"Well," the woman drawled, "Ganymede is a bunch of cowering sissies, always been. Even the Callistowans agree with us on that, let alone those morons from Io with that cheap shale they're passin' off as fuel. Still. The Six Stars boys swore up and down they saw a Fed ship, and with Ganymede showin' Earth its belly just like that, it's making us all a bit antsy. If you want the thicker platin'..."

Syaoran sighed wearily, and all of them expected it when she finished, "It's gonna cost you more."

The woman smiled happily, as if to say _now you're getting the message!_, and Yuui felt his heart sink. More expenses the crew were paying on on his behalf. "Listen," he said, in a low voice, "I still owe Captain Sourface for the fare out here -"

Sakura trod heavily on his foot, and when he glanced at her, she gave him a bright, artificially happy smile, seized his elbow, and pulled him away from the trader. Yuui took the hint and kept silent until they were some way down the walkway and Sakura released him. "Should I have not -"

"You shouldn't've offered to pay us," she said flatly. "The captain _said _you were as good as crew, at least on the way out here." She made her way over to the railing, looking down onto the market floor, and leaned against it with a small sigh. "Listen, if you don't want to keep your money because it's stolen and you don't think it's worth much, Yuui-san... there are other things you could spend it on. You could buy yourself a hard-vac suit. The captain might appreciate that more than anything else, since I learned a lot of really good naughty words when he found out you didn't have one to begin with."

"What use is a hard-vac suit if I'm going to stay here?" Yuui asked quietly, and Sakura sighed and _looked _at him.

"Are you?" she said. "Are you going to stay here, Yuui-san? Or do you think that there's some possibility that you'll stay with us? While you were with us we got attacked by the feds, which is admittedly a first; but you can cook, and you're smart, and I like having you around. To talk to." She stopped, self-conscious. "I'm sorry, it's just -"

Yuui sank down with his back to the railing, feeling old, suddenly. "But what, Sakura-chan?"

Sakura opened her mouth as if to reply, and then closed it, clearly having thought better of the plan. But Yuui knew her by now, knew how sometimes it took her some time to work out what she wanted to say, so he sat and said nothing until finally she volunteered, "I miss my brother."

_I know that feeling_, Yuui thought. He breathed out slowly. "It depends on Fai," he said, quietly. "I don't... I don't think I know Europa as well as I know the Mokona. But all of this - all of it, leaving Earth and coming out here - it was for Fai. I... I'll have to see, Sakura-chan. Captain Haggler says we'll... you'll... we'll be in dock for a few days yet."

Sakura smoothed her hair out of her face and nodded. She sucked in a deep breath, as if to centre herself, and then stood up straight, clasping her hands in front of her. "Yes," she said. "We'll be here for a little while yet. Let's get you a hard-vac suit anyway. That'd give us a new one for you, and the current ship's spare for your brother!"

Yuui sighed, contemplated arguing with her, and found he just didn't have the energy. The money _was_stolen, after all, and red with the blood he'd shed to get it; he wouldn't mind giving it away. "Do I get to pick the design?"

Sakura beamed at him. "As long as it's not pink," she said, seriously. "Then we might get ours mixed up."

Yuui glanced up at her from his seat on the floor, where his head was about level with her waist, and lifted his eyebrows; her poker face lasted for all of five seconds before she covered her mouth with her hand and giggled, and he couldn't help but smile along with her.

Sakura had that effect on people.

* * *

><p>The woman in front of Kurogane had a grin like a shark, and bright eyes that sparkled as she tapped the green touchscreen spread out flat between them. Under her fingers, the touchscreen played out the animation of cards shuffling; she flicked her hand toward him and two computerised cards flew across the screen to rest perfectly in front of him. Kurogane lifted the little flap in front of him with his left hand in order to display a personal monitor, taking another mouthful of his whiskey as he did so, and took in the card faces. Huh. A six and an eight. The dealer dealt herself out two cards and tapped on one of them to flip it over: a four.<p>

Next to him Karen took a drag on her cigarette and said, "Hit," and the dealer tossed her another card. They were the only three people at the blackjack table; although the Flower Garden dabbled in gambling, it was more to show off the pretty dealers than to attract any serious hustlers. Most of the hardcore players kept to their own clubs, further down in the ice.

The negotiating had been handled and now Kurogane had only to wait for the return of his crewmates. 39 per unit was the highest he'd been able to talk Karen into, which was fair enough; she had to make a profit, she'd been right about that. There were no betting cards on the table. This game was purely for recreation. Kurogane knew better than to gamble with his contacts.

"So," said Karen, taking a sip of her own drink - a fruity concoction with a lemon rind at the edge of the glass. Theirs was not the only cards table in use, although the presence of the owner had deterred most of the punters from approaching by itself. The roulette table just over was proving the most popular, its dealer a tall graceful Chinese woman wearing a spangly evening gown. "Word from my folk up on the port-web is that your ship's looking very battered."

Kurogane set his face in a sour expression. "Feds," he said. "Just after we cleared Martian airspace, they came at us. We sent them home limping."

Karen's earrings chimed as she tilted her head to look at him. "They've been getting pushier. There's rumours around here of a Fed ship skulking around."

With a gesture at the dealer, Kurogane was given another card; he grunted when it turned out to be a three. "There's always been rumours of Fed ships out here. You guys know they hate the piracy."

"They don't usually handle it directly," Karen pointed out. "Usually they subcontract pirate-busting to the mining companies, and _they _just post bounties up and leave it to us colonists. Did you hear there was a raid on Ganymede?"

Now that had Kurogane's attention. "A Fed raid?" he asked, and scowled when Karen nodded solemnly. "What were they after?"

"The same thing they're always after," she said. She closed her private monitor delicately, laying her cards out publicly on the table; Queen, six, five. The dealer nodded at her and after Kurogane had set out his hand, tapped her second card to flip it, revealing an eight. Karen smiled and took another drag of her cigarette. "They found quite a wealth of telepaths, as I understand it." With a sidelong glance at Kurogane, she ground out the cigarette butt in the ashtray affixed to the edge of the gameboard, and in a low voice, said, "Your kinetic's brother seems to be very interesting indeed."

"Yeah?" Kurogane tried to keep his voice neutral. "What've you heard?"

"Nothing much," Karen said, "Just rumours. More about your kinetic, but I can understand that. From what I've seen and heard, Yuui-san has a... great deal of power behind his gift. He dragged a fuel-freighter out of the air, in full Earth gravity, and smashed it into the grounds of the federation psi academy to create a distraction! I have never met a kinetic that gifted. Have you?"

Kurogane snorted. "He doesn't know how strong he is," he said. "I'm pretty damn sure of it. I've seen him use his gift since then. He acts like it's a big deal to restrain four humans at once, when I'm damn sure he could squash us flat without even thinking about it. Maybe there's some kind of confidence block there, I don't know. But he'll work for you, and hard."

A waitress walked past, pausing briefly to collect Kurogane's empty glass and deposit another one in front of him. Karen toyed with the slice of lemon, and then she said, quite abruptly, "Why are you letting him go?"

"I don't follow," said Kurogane.

"Your kinetic. That kind of talent doesn't just come and go. Was it the brother? He seems fundamentally flawed in some manner."

Kurogane scowled. "That spoonbender swears up and down he wasn't always like that. I don't know. They're close. The brother doesn't get on with my crew. The 'kinetic... doesn't know much about _anything_. Don't get me wrong, you know I'd shield 'em, but... he says he wants to leave the ship here, so I'm letting him go. I don't take anybody who doesn't want to be there. Otherwise they'd be a liability."

She just laughed. "Did you not see the poisonous look he gave you, when I mentioned that you were a customer here? Captain Kurogane, that poor in-Solar boy is half-smitten. What in the wide universe did you do to him?"

"_Nothing_," Kurogane growled, his grip tightening on his glass, but Karen was undeterred.

"When you radioed in to let us know to expect you, some of my... gentlemen became quite excited. And yet you haven't once asked for them." Her eyes were very bright, gleaming with barely-concealed glee. Among her legions of women, Karen harboured quite a few young men whose tastes were considered questionable on the hyper-masculine mining habitats; men whose inclinations put them at risk. Kurogane was no stranger to them, either.

"I'm on business," he said, in a low voice. "Triad business. That - that Earther wants to leave. So he can. No skin off my nose, he's a free man, after all. Him and his crazy brother."

"Mmm." Karen plucked the slice of lemon out of her drink, now looking rather bedraggled, and bit deeply into it. Kurogane knew she grew the fruits here on the habitat, somewhere under their feet where customers and outsiders were not permitted, but even with that local source their yield was low enough that even a lemon was a novelty, a fresh fruit. Karen glanced at him sharply. "You said the brother was a farseer, correct?"

"Yeah," Kurogane said. "Hardly an important skill, not burned-out like that."

Karen shrugged. "Perhaps it's not the man himself that's created the interest, but something he saw."

"If his brother chooses to stay here," Kurogane said, turning his attention to his hand, still face-up; the dealer had yet to deal again, "That'll be on you. Are you sure that's something you want on your back?"

After a while, Karen said, "I can handle the Feds. I handled the mining corporations and I've handled the miners. I'm not sure I could handle the consequences of turning this burned-out farseer over to the Feds, not when his brother went to so many lengths to get him out. As long as Yuui-san is... productive, I think I can keep them hidden from the occasional Fed patrol. Rumours of this ghost ship notwithstanding, it takes them too much time, fuel and money to make their way out to this far-flung little moon.

"Besides," she continued, raising her glass and delicately sipping from it, "I can tolerate a little bit of crazy, so long as Yuui-san pulls both their shares of the yoke."

It was strange, but something in the way she said that, some implication that she would hand them both over if Yuui was somehow unsatisfactory - Kurogane found it put his hackles up. He'd shielded Yuui - and his broken brother - for free; it had felt like the right thing to do. And he knew Karen didn't have the luxury of remaining mobile, like he did. He knew it. She was taking on a highly significant risk, and he hoped Yuui knew it too... but it bugged him, regardless. He put the glass down. "Speaking of the brother," he said bluntly, "Going to check if he's feeling better."

"You know the way," Karen said, but she was watching him as he pushed himself up to his feet. He left his glass there with her and her dealer, and didn't look back as he walked away.

The burned out farseer was curled on his side on the sofa. Yuui must have helped him out of his coat, which was spread over him like a blanket. He was also awake, which surprised Kurogane; his eyes were thin slits of blue. That said, he didn't so much as twitch when Kurogane let go of the heavy door, which slammed closed with more force than Kurogane was used to. "Shit," Kurogane said anyway, on reflex.

Fai's eyelashes fluttered. Kurogane leaned over the sofa, a little intrigued despite himself with this near-perfect duplicate of Yuui. It was hard to imagine this spaced-out, limp individual was worth anything to anyone except his twin. Yuui, now, with the strength of his gift - he could be worth a lot. If Karen was right and they wanted him for something he'd seen...

Kurogane straightened up with a grunt, folding his arms over his chest. Fai jerked slightly, his eyes opening a little more, although he didn't seem to be looking at Kurogane; he turned his head so that his cheek rested better against the sofa arm, his dull eyes staring out at nothing. His lips parted, giving him a slack-jawed look. Kurogane wondered briefly, and with some cautious distaste, if he was going to start drooling on Karen's sofa. He doubted she'd be pleased.

And then Fai said in a cool, professional tone, "Long-range recon station six six eight echo to Macau central psionics. Received tip-off confirming location of the Black Dragon of Suwa. Suspect Suwa no Youou is currently located in the Flower Garden habitat on Jovian satellite Europa, over."

Kurogane stared, his arms unfolding to fall to his sides. Fai's gaze was still glassy and uncomprehending. "Oi," he said, unnerved, "The fuck are you talking about? How do you know that name?"

"Macau - Macau central - This is Macau central central central -" Fai screwed his eyes shut, his voice rising, "Static, I can't, clairvoyant cancels out clairvoyant it's fuzzy I _can't_ - Macau central psionics confirms - confirms, static and static again, it all goes around and comes out as dust - Macau central issuing confirmation to Eurasian Federation Deep Space Battleship _Mihara_ , you are cleared for jump - jump jump jump _jump_!"

To Kurogane's horror Fai's back seemed to seize painfully and he screamed, an animal, inhuman sound as he bent backwards on the sofa, his legs jerking painfully as he kicked against the coat; without thinking Kurogane rushed forward, throwing his weight over the blond's legs to keep them still and grabbing his wrists to immobilize his hands. At that moment the door flew open, and Kurogane had just enough time to notice a flash of blue before Yuui was next to him, skidding to his knees on the carpeted floor. His power fell over his twin like a wave, and Kurogane let go slowly, watching carefully as Fai's body remained rigid but unmoving, caught in the grips of his brother's telekinesis. He glanced up at Yuui, who was kneeling on the floor next to Fai's head, both of his hands cupping his brother's face; Yuui's teeth were gritted and sweat gleamed on his brow. Fai's face was shuddering between Yuui's hands, the only part of him that seemed to move, and his eyes were tearing about in their sockets.

Eventually even those movements slowed and stilled. Kurogane pushed himself off the blond, watching carefully for any signs the fit would resume, but aside for the rapid rise and fall of his chest as he panted for air, Fai was motionless. Yuui let go of Fai's face, but did not release him, except to stroke his hair back briefly. He was breathing heavily, too.

"I didn't do anything to him," Kurogane said sharply, and Yuui's blue eyes flickered up to look at him. "I just came to see if he was doing okay -"

"I didn't think you did," Yuui interrupted. He heaved out a sigh, pushing a sweaty lock of Fai's hair behind his ear, and then abruptly dipped his head to rest his forehead against Fai's temple. "It's not the first seizure he's had. He used to have them before - before we went to the psi academy. He went into hospital for them, once."

"He was talking," said Kurogane. "Before the fit, I mean. Sounded like he was repeating comm traffic or something."

Yuui pulled a face and said, in a soft, sad voice, "My brother isn't himself, Captain. He says a lot of things that don't make sense, or that are just - paranoid. It doesn't matter."

Kurogane stared down at Fai, who seemed to have returned to his barely-conscious state, eyes down and unfocused, and said, "No."

That got Yuui's attention. He looked up sharply at Kurogane and said, archly, "Excuse me?"

"He's supposed to be a farseer, right? A clairvoyant? He said some stuff that - I recognised. It doesn't matter what," he added angrily, when Yuui looked as if he were about to ask, "But I don't think he's all the way insane." Kurogane raised his hands and scrubbed them through his hair, thinking quickly. "Listen, one of the things he said was _clairvoyant cancels out clairvoyant_. You're the spoonbender, what does that mean?"

Yuui looked surprised. "It means a clairvoyant can't see what another clairvoyant is doing, or see places where there are large concentrations of clairvoyants," he said, raising an eyebrow. He glanced at his brother. "You think he was using his _gift_?"

_No_, Kurogane thought, suddenly more sure than he'd been of anything else, _I know it. Which means - which means someone he was spying on was blabbing to the Feds about me_. Which in turn meant he needed to get the hell out of Europa, fast. "Maybe," he said impatiently. "Listen, where're the kids?"

"On the ship," Yuui said, startled. "Syaoran bought some plating to install, and Sakura's putting away the stuff we brought. Captain Hurry, what's -"

Kurogane pushed open the door, and Yuui scrambled to his feet. "Karen said there was might be a Fed ship prowling around the Jovian moons. That means we have at most a week to get the hell out of here before it reaches us, assuming it's at the furthest colony, which is probably Io around this time of year. I think your brother was trying to warn me to get out of here before I attract attention."

Yuui was staring at him, wide-eyed, and Kurogane couldn't help but relent. "Listen. I'll hurry through reloading, but I want to be out of here by this evening. I don't want those bastard Feds finding anything but dust. That gives you three hours. You need to decide if you're going to stay here or come with -"

"Actually," cut in a new voice, and Kurogane swivelled his head to see Karen standing in the hallway before the door he was still open. She looked more grim and focused than he'd ever seen her, but there was something strange about her expression, something brittle that he couldn't quite recognise. Her voice, when she continued, was wavering and a little unsteady. "You've got substantially less time than that. The chatter on the port-web above the moon surface is going berserk."

Kurogane could feel that cold hard knot of adrenaline beginning to form in his stomach. "That ship," he said, "The Fed ship. It's here already, isn't it."

And Karen met his eyes, and he knew then what the expression on her face was: worry. "I've never seen anything like it, Kurogane," she said. "It's bigger than any ship I've ever seen. Apparently it just... appeared, out there in the black. I don't know how..." She trailed off, uncertainly, but Kurogane could guess what she had been about to say. _I don't know how it got this close so quietly_.

"Jumped," Fai mumbled on the sofa, "The spider found us in its web. The _Mihara_has us. I told you. I told you..."

"What are we going to do?" asked Yuui, and Kurogane looked between them; at Fai, still rambling softly under his breath, crazed and incoherent; and at Yuui, who had done so much to keep him safe, and he knew.

"Get your brother," he said. "We're going back to the ship."

* * *

><p>Kurogane stormed onto the bridge of the Mokona, slamming down into the Captain's chair. He seethed with nervous tension and slow-burning rage, thrumming under his skin like the hiss of a hydraulic pump even as he pounded out the key sequence for the Mokona's high-alert protocols. Damn it, things had been going so <em>well;<em> they should have left all this behind millions of kilometers ago. Didn't these Fed bastards know when the hell to _give up?_

The display leapt to life, zooming in on the patch of space beyond the edges of the Europa docks where the warship hovered. It cruised slowly around the borders of Europan space sovereignty, but did not - yet - dare to cross that invisible boundary.

Whatever they wanted Yuui and his brother for, it was increasingly clear that there was no time nor money cost that would deter them from coming after him. Not now, and possibly not ever.

"Captain," Yuui said, and for once he didn't follow it up with any silly nicknames; that as much as the tension of his voice said what the blond 'kinetic was afraid to.

Kurogane spared a moment from his pre-flight preparations to meet Yuui's eyes, so blue and so shadowed. "Get your brother secured in your cabin," he said with a growl. "Sedate him if you have to, just keep him out of the way. We might have to do some tight maneuvering to get out of here."

Some of the tension went out of Yuui's shoulders, like he'd let out a breath he'd been long holding. Kurogane couldn't muster up a smile, not in the middle of all this, but he gave Yuui a steady stare he hoped would be reassuring. "You're part of the crew now," he said. "Both of you. We don't give up on our own."

"The kids," Yuui replied anxiously, but Kurogane cut him off with a sharp jerk of his hand.

"Too late for all of us," he said. "We're all implicit. We're all involved. We're fucking _fine_ with that. Now all we can do is get out of here. _As a crew_, whole."

Yuui did smile, though it was wan and weak compared to his usual million-watt grins. "Thank you, Captain," he said, and then dropped down out of sight through the hatch.

Once he was out of the way, Kurogane's mind turned towards accounting for the other members of their crew. He keyed open a comm channel and raised Sakura's helmet frequency. "Tell me you're on board," he said, without any preamble.

"Yes, Captain!" Sakura's voice came back through the link, excited and breathless. "I just docked with the shuttle now. I have the last load of consumables with me."

Kurogane grunted satisfaction. "Get them stowed somewhere, anywhere they won't be flying around if things get messy. Then get to the engine room."

"Aye aye, cap'n," Sakura said, and dropped off the channel. As soon as it was clear Kurogane switched over from Sakura's comm frequency to Syaoran's.

"We've got trouble, kid," he announced, keeping one eye on the display where the warship hovered.

"Yes, I see them coming," Syaoran's voice came back. Kurogane frowned at the muffled echo. There was a subtle distinction - one you would never hear unless you had grown up in a space installation - between the way a voice sounded inside an unsealed helmet, and one that was closed on vacuum. Kurogane quickly pinged Syaoran's suit telemetry, and -

"What the hell are you doing out there?" Kurogane barked, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end as the picture resolved itself: Syaoran was out-ship. "Get back inside, now!"

"No, captain," Syaoran answered calmly.

Kurogane glared at the arm of his chair as though the glare could transfer to his wayward pilot. "That wasn't a suggestion, dammit! I gave you an order!"

"And this isn't a military outfit, so you can't give orders," Syaoran countered. "Listen, the repairs on the last armor plates are almost complete. Without them, we'll be a sitting duck if this comes to a firefight - one good hit on the weakened section and we'll all be breathing space."

"We'll just have to take that chance," Kurogane growled. "We've got a bogey within positive visual range, for fuck's sake. Leave the repairs and get to safety!"

"They can't open fire yet and you know it," Syaoran pointed out. "Right now every weapons-capable boat in Europa local space is locked on to them. They might be bigger than any individual ship out here, but they can't possibly fight all of them at once and they know it.

"If they want to engage with us, they'll have to either wait till we leave the dock, or negotiate with Europa fire control for permission to come in and apprehend us. Either way, we should have a lead warning time of at least three hours. I'll be finished the last weld and back inside by then, but I can't leave it now."

Kurogane ground his teeth, but he knew that Syaoran was right - both about the standoff and the armor plating. Technically, this wasn't even Syaoran's job - he was the pilot, not the ship's engineer, but both he and Syaoran knew that Syaoran would never permit the thought of sending Sakura into harm's way. Nor would he. "All right," he yielded grudgingly.

Stats and specs were beginning to scroll up on the display alongside the static image of the floating fortress; the _Mihara _was a battlecruiser-class, with a crew of thousands and enough missile power to blow apart a sufficiently small moon. The up side was that in terms of sheer acceleration, there was no way a ship with that much mass could match the speed of the Mokona. The down side was that they had a huge missile envelope, and more than enough armaments to blow the smaller ship out of the sky as soon as they made a move.

How the hell had they even _gotten _out here? It didn't make sense; it couldn't happen. Spaceships of any size were strictly limited in how far they could go by the docking and refueling capabilities of the ports at their destination. None of the Jovian moon colonies had port facilities that would, or even could, handle a Fed warship of that size. The only thing that Kurogane could think was that they'd somehow manage to construct a secret base out in Jupiter local space, out of sight of any of the locals. The logistical cost of such an operation would be staggering, but it was the only explanation that made sense.

Which meant that even if Kurogane could get his ship out from under the _Mihara's _eye and out of Europa local space, there was the very pressing question of where they could go. If the Feds could field warships in Jovian space, that meant none of the lunar colonies - Callisto, Europa, or Ganymede - would be safe from them. Where, then? The only manmade habitation between them and deep space was distant, lonely Triton, and it was becoming painfully clear that distance alone was no protection.

Kurogane's feverish thoughts were interrupted by a blat from his console. A communications request had just come in from the Fed ship. Kurogane considered ignoring it - he doubted there was anything the Feds had to say that he wanted to hear - but in the end he punched the channel open with a curse. If nothing else, maybe talking around in circles would buy them some time, or maybe he could piss them off enough to make a fatal mistake.

The setting that resolved itself on his screen was painfully, hatefully familiar: a uniformed figure seated in front of the prim, dull green background of the Eurasian Federal Alliance's banner and seal. The speaker wore the trim uniform of a Federal Captain like a second skin - he wasn't sure if it was a good or a bad sign that the ship's commander was addressing him directly instead of going through a subordinate. At the very least it meant that they weren't underestimating him.

The captain herself was a woman, which surprised Kurogane somewhat; although the Federal military was supposedly open and egalitarian, the reality of the old-boys network firmly in place behind the scenes kept most women from ascending to senior rank. Those women who did manage to fight their way up in the hierarchy to command positions tended to be competent, driven and ruthless, not necessarily a good thing from their perspective.

"Captain Kanoe Kigai, of the Eurasian Federal Deep Space Battleship _Mihara, _commanding," the woman said crisply. She had long, glossy black hair that flowed in attractive waves down her shoulders, heavy-lidded eyes and firm sensual lips; under other circumstances Kurogane might have found her attractive. As it was, her appearance only repulsed him; the more so when contrasted with her voice, which was as cold as the ice world below. "You are suspected of carrying illegal cargo, unlicensed telepaths, and wanted criminals of Federal jurisdiction. You are hereby ordered to heave to and submit your vehicle for a military inspection."

Kurogane keyed the comm channel open from his side as well. In contrast to her impeccably-turned out appearance, he knew that his own left a lot to be desired; rumpled and bedraggled from the day's activities, with only the cramped and rundown background of the Mokona's cockpit to frame him. He didn't care. "Captain Kurogane of the independently registered passenger freighter _Mokona,"_ he replied. "The Eurasian Federal Deep Space Battleship _Mihara _is hereby ordered to kiss my ass."

Kanoe smiled, a cold expression that moved her full lips but not her eyes. "Surprisingly mouthy for a man in your position, Captain," she said. "The _Mihara _possesses overwhelming fire superiority, and you have nowhere to run. Your best chance is to surrender now peacefully, when some leniency might still be offered."

"I've had all I can fill of Fed leniency in my lifetime," Kurogane growled. "We're millions of miles outside of Earth's jurisdiction, and none of your big talk is going to change that. If you try to pick a fight in Europan airspace, you'll find very quickly that your 'superior firepower' is a load of cold gas. There's enough hardware in Europa orbit right now to turn your fancy ship to scrap."

"So there is," Kanoe replied. "I think we've danced through enough formalities by now, haven't we Captain?" And the comm channel abruptly went dead.

As Kurogane was still trying to figure out just what she'd hoped to accomplish with that - other than cutting him out of the last word, of course - the console blatted at him _again, _this time with the multi-harmonic tone that indicated a message was going out on the all-ships deep-space beacon channels.

"What the hell is she doing?" Kurogane muttered. That particular frequency was reserved for emergency events, intended to warn every ship in local space of an explosion that might put shrapnel in their path or a local gravity flux. Only the highest authorities of the space traffic control agency had access to it; how the hell had this harpy gotten them in her pocket? Unless, of course, she'd simply hacked it; messing with the emergency beacons was the sort of thing that a deep-spacer would never even consider, but who knew what these dirtsuckers were capable of?

The transmission came over Mokona's speakers, not just his personal comm channel. Kurogane couldn't have turned it off even if he'd wanted to. "All ships," Kanoe's voice rang out, only slightly fuzzed by static. "All ships in Europa local dock. This is a public service announcement from the Eurasian Federal Bureau of Revenue Services. The independently registered small-freight class _Mokona, _currently docked at berth one-one-seven Alpha in local space, is known to be carrying fugitives of intense interest to the Federation. A monetary reward of no less than ten million yenbucks will be redeemed, cash upon delivery, through the nearest official representative of the EFBRS." Her voice lost its clipped, emotionless delivery and took on a sardonic, triumphant tinge. "That would be us. Have at it, boys."

For one precious moment Kurogane sat frozen in his captain's chair, mind still gibbering at the implications of Kanoe's little speech. Every ship in the _sky_ would have heard that, it wasn't something that any ship could shut out even if they'd _wanted_ to ignore it. And ten million yenbucks, ten _million,_ that was enough to buy your own goddamned _habitat _on this worthless iceberg! Every lowlife grubber and cutout with a ship that could mount a weapon would be -

A shrill alarm broke into his paralysis, followed by a surging hum and ripple of the deck around them. "Proximity detected," Mokona announced. "Lidar targeting detected on the starboard hull, source one-seven-nine point nine kilometers planet southward. Initiating evasive maneuvers."

Kurogane cursed and dove for his controls, hastily switching the Mokona's threat priority system away from the _Mihara,_ still hanging safely - and smugly - outside of range. Live weapons this close to the dock, were these people frigging _insane, _they were likely to blow up half the Europan infrastructure as well as vaporizing their intended moneymaker -

The only thing that saved them was that the _Mokona's _systems had already been on high alert when the first shot came in. They managed to twist out of the path of the first missile, streaking past them in a dark path to nowhere, and then it was Kurogane's turn. Her guns were hot and so were her antimissile defenses; the hapless ship who'd fired that shot hadn't been so lucky, the nameless greedy skipper jumping to get his shot in before anyone else could react. Kurogane's torrent of return fire barreled into him in a swift blossoming of fire, blooming silent and deadly in his display.

But although the doomed ship's shot had missed them, the quarters were just too close for it to pass harmlessly by. It struck the edge of the _Mokona's_ berth and exploded, shredding the reinforced steel like so much paper-mache. The explosion rocked through the _Mokona's _cockpit, a tsunami of concussive force carried to them by the long arms of the pier scaffolding that had held them in place.

Damage reports flooded Kurogane's console in a wave of scarlet, but his attention was riveted by only one: a glancing bit of shrapnel had winged by the section of the Mokona's hull plating that had been damaged in the last firefights. The section where the armor repairs were, even now, just being completed.

The hoarse yell of Syaoran's voice over his comm link hung frozen in the Mokona's cockpit. The debris had only glanced off him, not enough to damage his suit... but it had snapped his tether line like a thread, and the concussive jolt of the _Mokona _had sent the tiny suited figure spinning off in the opposite direction. The computer readouts showed his suit's telemetry: still lit up, still sustaining life-support, but the distance between suit and ship climbing rapidly and uncontrollably upwards.

Syaoran was still alive, but falling untethered into the endless black emptiness of space.

And a half-dozen more ships were just beginning to turn towards them, lighting up red on Kurogane's threat display as their weapons systems came online.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	22. 19: a cosmic castaway

**Title**: Not Quite Paradise  
><strong>Pairing<strong>: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.  
><strong>Warnings<strong>: Violence, sexual content, crazy.  
><strong>Summary<strong>: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

* * *

><p>"Syaoran!" Sakura's scream of anguish ripped a deafening feedback squeal over the comm link, and nearly knocked Yuui to the floor. They were back in their tiny cabin, Yuui trying to persuade Fai to take some tranquilizers and sleep the rest of the battle, Fai refusing. Yuui's eyes whipped around to the display panel by the door, and his blood ran cold at the red-blaring alerts he saw there.<p>

"Fai, stay here," Yuui implored his twin, trying to gently detangle his hands from Fai's. "Stay here and just - just be quiet, don't do anything while I sort this out, okay?"

Fai's head cocked to the side. "I'll stay, until the time is right," he said agreeably. "The tempo is increasing. Can't you hear it? Dun-dun-dun- _dun_!" He hummed the opening bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony happily. "She'll need me on the bridge, then - they'll all need me."

"No! You have to stay in here!" Yuui did not have _time _to humor his twin's crazy talk, not right now. Syaoran needed him. Sakura needed him. Kurogane - There was no time. He hurried over to the cabin's hatch and dropped down the ladder, only to see Fai standing up from the bed as if to follow him.

In desperation, he grabbed the large, bulky couch module and used his telekineses to drag it over the door. It was far too heavy for Fai to move alone in his condition; once it was positioned across the doorway, he'd be stuck inside until Yuui came back to let him out. It was the best lock he could improvise under the circumstances, if Mokona still could not reliably lock Fai out of the system.

Yuui flew down the corridor, feeling a horrible sense of deja vu ringing in his head. The deckplates shuddered beneath his feet as the Mokona heaved and twisted, still reverberating from the shock of the initial missile hit and with the added stresses of their high-acceleration evasive maneuvers. Swinging around the corner into the shuttle's docking bay he saw Sakura, clinging to the padded railing by the EVA console with both hands as though it was all that was keeping her on her feet.

"Sakura-chan!" Yuui called out, and Sakura did not turn her head as he hurried up to her. Her face was pale and gray with shock, her eyes wide and transfixed on the display ahead of her. It showed an external scan of the Mokona's local space, now showered with glittering debris from the expired missiles and the detritus of the damaged dock. One distant glittering speck glowed bright red on Mokona's overlay, and Yuui's heart jolted with horror as he realized that receding speck was Syaoran.

"He's gone," Sakura said, and her voice was flat and dull with shock.

"What? No! That can't be!" Yuui lunged towards the display port, searching for the suit's telemetry readings - there they were, still lit up, still alive, showing all greens and yellows of a suit in full function. "His suit is fully rated for hard-vac, isn't it? It wasn't damaged in the blast, he should be fine! He has hours of oxygen left -"

"You don't understand," Sakura said, and a trembling sob crept into her words. "Yuui-san, you've forgotten just how large space is. And how empty. There's a hundred cubic kilometers of empty vacuum surrounding this ship right now, and only a few square meters of it at a time is occupied by anything. The odds of getting close enough..." Her voice died in a despairing squeak.

Yuui looked up at her, wide-eyed and horrified. "Sakura, what are you saying?" he exclaimed. "We can't just let him -"

"I'm saying that the odds of a successful deep-space suit rescue are three thousand to one!" Sakura jumped to her feet, hands balled into fists. "Just getting close enough to match velocities with something that small - it's almost impossible! And there's nothing we have, nothing, with enough precision to stop that tumble without t-tearing the suit in half..."

She covered her face with her hands, and broke down into sobs. Yuui stared, unable to comprehend the meaning of what she was saying. In the periphery of his vision, bright red and yellow alerts flashed with the results of the short brutal firefight between the Mokona and the two other ships that had tried to sneak a few shots in. One reeled away, limping as it spewed air and frozen water crystals from its punctured hydraulic tanks; the other came apart completely, lighting up the screen with a silently expanding aurora of white and yellow fire. The Captain's voice crackled over the radio in her ear, set to the local open-comm broadcast channel. _"Who's next?" _he roared.

"It would almost be better if," Sakura whimpered, gulped a deep breath of air and tried again. "It would almost be b-better if he wasn't... he wasn't... he could live for hours out there, sick and afraid, and we can't do anything but listen..."

"Now prepping the shuttle Mokona-010 for launch," Mokona's voice came unexpectedly over the speaker - the local ship's channels. "Passengers Yuui, Sakura, please proceed to the boarding area as soon as possible."

"What do you mean, launch?" Yuui said in bewilderment. "We can't leave the ship now, not in the middle of a firefight!"

"Mokona-010 is programmed with the protocols appropriate to deep-space rescue," the computer's voice came back smoothly. "Please proceed to the boarding area. Prognosis for successful retrieval becomes more difficult with every 10 seconds elapsed."

"But..." Yuui let himself be chivvied along, fumbling for the seals of her helmet even as she stumbled towards the shuttle's hatch.

"But it's almost impossible to retrieve someone lost in deep space!" Sakura exclaimed. "My tutors always told me that the success rate for an operation like that was less than half a percentage point!"

"Incorrect parameters," Mokona replied. "With the inclusion of a skilled telekinetic on the retrieval team, the odds of successful retrieval rise to 9.84%."

"Of course!" Sakura exclaimed, leaping to her feet. Her eyes were shining, her expression bursting with excitement as though the moment of despair had never existed. "Yuui-san, you're a kinetic! The rules don't apply to you! I picked up your suit from the manufacturer's before the alarm went off, I haven't unloaded it yet - you can suit up while I pilot the shuttle out there, you can -"

"Oh, no," Yuui said, backing up a step without conscious realization. A cold stab went through his chest, as though the cold of vacuum had already penetrated under his skin; his mouth went dry, his palms clammy. "Sakura, I can't - I've never done any EVA maneuvers, I don't have the right training, I can't -"

"Yes, you have!" Sakura said, grabbing his arm and barging towards the shuttle. "It's just the same as your zero-gee training. I can get you within half a kilometer, you can take it from there. You can stop him, you can catch him, you can bring him back!"

"Sakura-chan -" Yuui stumbled along beside her, pleading. "I can't - I left Fai in my chambers, he's all alone, what if something happens and I can't -"

"Please, Yuui," Sakura said, tears filling her eyes as she turned to face Yuui head-on. "There's no time to lose. Every second Syaoran-kun gets further and further into space, and if we don't get to him right away -" Her voice broke.

How could she ask this of him? How, when he still woke up in the middle of the night twitching and shivering from the memory of that endless void that had stared him in the face through the gaping cracks of the Mokona's walls. He got through every day by steadfastly ignoring the knowledge that the cold nothingness waited in every direction, separated from his skin only by a thin layer of metal and plastic. No matter how spectacular the view, looking out the windows or display ports always gave him the swooping feeling of falling endlessly in every direction.

And now she wanted him to go _out _into that nothing, millions of miles expanding in every direction away from his skin, go out without a tether or a pod or anything to guide him back if he was lost in it? She asked him to step knowingly and willingly into his worst nightmare?

Yes, he realized. Yes she did, because Syaoran was already there. And if Yuui didn't man up and stop quaking in his boots, Syaoran was going to die out there, and his body would be swallowed forever by the hungry void.

Yuui took a deep breath, and it felt like eternity, but it was really only a few seconds before he nodded and strode forward. "Let's go," he said, and the steely determination in his voice almost disguised the wavering catch.

The two of them piled into the shuttle, and Sakura ran forward to the pilot's chair while Yuui fumbled with the unfamiliar blue and white mass of plastic-coated fabric that was his vac suit. For all its heavy bulk, it felt terribly flimsy when he thought of going out unprotected in the nothing, of missiles and shrapnel screaming towards him at dozens of kilometers per second -

"Captain?" He heard Sakura's voice coming tinny out of his suit's comm unit, and it came into focus as he settled the helmet over his head. He felt a sudden flash of dizzy pain as he did, and grit his teeth as he staggered and leaned on the bulkhead for balance.

"Not the best time, Princess," Kurogane returned to her, his voice taut. Despite the dire circumstances, Yuui still felt himself warned by the practical, no-nonsense confidence in the big man's voice.

"I'll keep it short," he heard Sakura say. "Yuui and I are taking the shuttle and going after Syaoran-kun. We need you to watch our backs while we're out there." The chances of being hit by a stray piece of shrapnel or misaimed missile were miniscule; the chance of being deliberately targeted by one was much greater, especially if it looked like they were trying to make a break for it.

"It's dangerous," Kurogane warned her, unnecessarily. "Can't you stay on the Mokona?"

"I can't pilot the shuttle, Captain Cautious," Yuui chimed into the conversation. "And I certainly can't pilot and go out-ship at the same time."

"And besides," Sakura added, "I owe to him - to Syaoran-kun - to give him every chance, even the smallest. If there's anything I can do to help, I'll do it."

"All right," Kurogane said, even as the Mokona's bay doors thumped. The final-sounding jolt was followed by a sudden silence as vacuum surrounded them, and a swooping sensation as the shuttle lost the Mokona's gravity. "I'll cover you. Be careful out there. Both of you."

"We will, Captain," Yuui said formally, for once dispensing with the ridiculous nicknames. He heard Kurogane grunt in acknowledgement, his attention already turning back to his tactical plots.

The shuttle clanked and hissed all around them, and then the bottom dropped out of his stomach as they plunged into the void in search of Syaoran.

* * *

><p>it's snowing in hong kong.<p>

the psi command are sitting there, rows of telepaths in circles in the tower, clairvoyants watching over them and working with them. he sees them, briefly, before it hurts and the vision breaks up. fai knows. when they receive their tip-off about this captain of theirs fai sees it too, and he knows - knew - knows it's something he has to warn about. talking. he doesn't know where he is but he knows there's trouble on the way, and he speaks, blindly, eyes roaming far away as he talks, warning, _warning_. the mihara is coming, and then quite suddenly she's there, thousands of crew members, and yuui and their captain are talking and then fai lets his anchor go and drifts, out of body.

europa hurts. there's too many people, too much noise, too many possibilities. he drifted away in the elevator and when he drifts back to himself he's somehow back in their cabin on the ship and he doesn't know how they got there, too busy spent admiring starbursts and the pattern of ice. there's an early frost in tokyo. the shinsengumi sector glitters. he sees too much and too far. yuui is pulling his boots off, anxiously chattering - "We're going to try escaping, Fai, the Captain is going to... I don't know, but things could get hectic -"

then suddenly they're being hailed by the woman who thinks she controls the _Mihara _and yuui is too still in their cabin, head cocked as he listens. Fai pats his twin's hand softly and settles back, lets his mind wander further; across the black, through a creature whose bones are hard steel and whose mind he sculpted himself even as his was breaking apart.

The captain of the _Mihara_ is a stranger, a Queen seated regally on her throne, grinning like a piranha as she cuts their captain off; but it's not her Fai is interested in. In an invisible body he walks on silent feet around the battleship's bridge, gaze flitting over the rows of straight-backed crew, men and women gazes affixed to their consoles. "They're not giving up," the _Mihara_'s captain says smugly to one of those crew members, "Get us broadcast power over the beacon channels and hand me that microphone."

She sits on her throne full of power, but there is another chair in the bridge with no console in front of it, no computer for its holder to stare at. He is in red and black, this unoccupied third party; red and black jumpsuit, yellow visor lowered over his eyes to block distraction. Fai remembers the training kit. His chair is on a lower tier than the captain's, and Fai walks down some steps toward it, curious and unafraid. he is clairvoyant but he is invisible, invisible as the machines in a colony's upper atmosphere, and he descends the steps wondering.

not all of them see the colors as colors. he knows that. the man in the chair has spiky dark hair and his fingertips are moving, elegant in the air, imaginary conductor's baton as he sways gently to music only he can hear; he lounges sideways over the chair, legs dangling over the chair's arm by their knees. fai tilts his head and nods. he knows this one. no passing messages, he's farseer not 'path, but he touches the black-and-red man's shoulder gently, and then he goes home to the body he remembers.

"Have at it, boys," the captain's voice purrs over their cabin system. Yuui is fretting, playing with the display on their computer monitor, and Fai stretches like a cat.

"It's Monou," he tells Fai. "They're using Fuuma. That's good. He's new. They haven't freighted him out everywhere yet."

"Not right now, Fai," Yuui says tightly. "Syaoran's outside and I don't know what that - oh my god. Oh my _god_, no -"

the ship shakes; Yuui pales. the sergeant spins away, screaming. he's terrified, his eyes wide, and fai goes to reach out for him instinctively and stops; clairvoyant, not 'kinetic either, he can't change anything in his visions. and why should he? he's the sergeant, the sergeant...

… never had eyes so light, nor hair neither; the sergeant had a scar on his jaw and the scared boy drifting away doesn't. comprehension dawns and fai shifts suddenly. _That's not the sergeant_.

"I have to go," Yuui babbles, "Oh god, I have to go, maybe the captain knows what to do - stay here Fai, I'll be right back -"

he's gone. fai rolls over, spilling off the bed, and looks thoughtfully at the door.

it's snowing in hong kong. the flakes spiral out of the sky, settle on ashura's umbrella as he hurries across the courtyard between psi academy classes. it's snowing in hong kong, and fuuma's fingers are marking time for a beethoven composition in the sterile air of the _Mihara_ 's bridge, no sound but computers chirping at their operators. it's snowing in hong kong, and the sergeant isn't the sergeant at all. _syaoran_ . yuui's caught up with not-suu, _sakura _in the engine room, and there are rainbows flickering at the edges of everything, and fai is suddenly angry.

_furious_ , maybe. they did these things to him, _to him_ , left him like this, and he is so angry it's white heat in his belly; the rising tide of rage and hate that gives him the strength to move. he remembers pain. he doesn't _care_. he rolls out of bed, takes in a deep breath.

"Mokona," he says, and he feels the AI regarding him, summoned by her name, "Do I have to execute the program I wrote from your main console?"

"Affirmative," she murmurs, his Mokona, his mystery. Ichihara prototype. never seen anything like her before. why is she here? "Bypassing door lock. Door remains obstructed."

she's crippled just like he is, memory of pain fierce and present, but Fai tosses his head indignantly. _Shocks_. Not supposed to travel except in certain circumstances. certain circumstances using EFS approved tech; an ichihara industries ai-controlled ship, in its pilot chair... the pilot's chair will be empty, now, waiting for him...

His feet are bare and freezing, and the metal floor of Mokona's innards are rough and uncomfortable; Yuui pulled a piece of furniture in front of the door in some misguided attempt at protecting him. Fai studies it thoughtfully. there's no way he can move it by himself. he pads forward and touches it, tries halfheartedly. it's too heavy and too bulky, and the only way he can use it is... yes. If he does the sleep-stealing trick again.

it's harder to do when they're both awake, but he remembers. he _remembers _how he did it last time, stole from yuui to chase away the fogginess so he could begin fixing things. if he wants to continue, he'll have to try. He sits cross-legged on the floor in the middle of their cabin, tucking his feet behind his knees, and he closes his eyes, and he reaches for that invisible thread between them. it's lax now, but it's not too hard to give it a sharp tug. it has to be taut to borrow anything worthwhile. wakefulness is one thing, he needs a greater gift.

he has a flash of the corridors of the ship through Yuui's eyes as his twin scrambles along the winding torus; he can feel his brother's fear and it makes his chest ache. yuui hates space. fai wants so badly to make him happy and to keep him safe. It is just - the safety just comes first, and he reaches, and he _tugs_ . he feels Yuui's sudden flash of pain, somehow _is _his brother as Yuui staggers up against a corridor wall, swearing under his breath, both hands pressed to his temples to ward off the flash of headache that must have bolted through him - but fai remains calm, and he reaches out, and he pushes.

the couch slides out of the way. he releases his grip on that connecting thread with an oddly melancholy pang and climbs to his feet, and the door hisses open for him, no longer obstructed.

Yuui and Sakura are in the shuttle. He sets off in the other direction, clad in a sleeveless shirt and thin shorts, no feet, no clothes, _no shocks_. the ship shakes as she takes another blow; captain is roaring threats and speakers are faithfully relaying them from every corner - "Don't cross me, you motherfucking slag-scrappers, don't you cross me if you value your lives!"

it's snowing in hong kong and raining on tokyo, and his eyes hurt. now, today, fai climbed the hatch to the bridge without difficulty. he was where he was supposed to be. he had a job to do.

* * *

><p>It was a bad idea to cry in a space suit. That lesson every spacer kid learned, whether from the lectures in the safety training classes or (more definitively) from painful experience out in the field. Everyone learned, sooner or later, the three big <em>nevers<em> once the helmet was down and sealed: never throw up, never cry, and for the love of god _don't sneeze._

She knew that, but she couldn't help it now, strapped into the pilot seat of the Mokona's shuttle as tears poured steadily down her face. If only she could have reached up and opened the visor of her suit she could at least have wiped her eyes... but that was a stupid thing to do when navigating small craft in the middle of a battlefield, and she knew it too well.

Syaoran's suit was still out of sight, nothing more than a distant speck against the unwavering stars and a set of telemetry readouts on Mokona's computer. His audio channel was still open, the only link left between them, and she could hear the terrified, gasping sobs he made with every breath; they tore answering sobs from her own chest, even as she pleaded with him not to be afraid.

"It's all right, Syaoran," she said, and paused to take a deep breath in through her nose, out through her mouth, and again. "It's gonna be okay. We're coming to get you, we're bringing the shuttle after you. Yuui's here, he's going to do a spacewalk and bring you back, so just hang on, okay? We aren't going to leave you, we aren't going to abandon you. Just hang on..."

Sakura kept up the soothing monologue as the endless minutes ticked by, but Syaoran never answered her. Maybe he couldn't; maybe he'd been stunned or dazed in the concussion that threw him off the ship. Maybe it was all he could do to hold onto the rhythm of his breathing, in the grip of the nauseating spin that blast had imparted him when it kicked him away. Maybe his receiver was knocked out, and he didn't even know that help was coming.

She couldn't devote all her attention to the radio, though, when she had to concentrate so hard on piloting the shuttle. In the cabin behind her she could hear Yuui struggling into his suit, his movements slow and unpracticed; a part of her wanted to scream at him for taking so long, but she knew perfectly well that even if he were ready right this instant there were still long minutes to go before the shuttle approached the disembarkation point.

Sakura longed to shunt power to the thrusters and roar to Syaoran's rescue, but she couldn't. The immutable law of space travel was that for every minute spent accelerating, you spent just as much time and fuel decelerating at the end. If she pushed too hard, they would overshoot Syaoran's position and waste even more time in fidgety and clumsy corrections. Instead she let Mokona measure the distances and calculate precisely, and lay in a careful cruising speed that would bring them to a gentle near-rest relative to Syaoran's suit. Even with the computer's help, though, they could only manage to get within a certain range of Syaoran. After that it would be all up to Yuui.

It was finicky, hair-raising work, and Sakura nearly cried at the frustration of it: she wasn't even that good of a pilot, it wasn't her gift. Syaoran could have done much better... Thank God that Kurogane had insisted that all members of the Mokona's crew be capable of fulfilling all the roles, apart from fire control which he reserved for himself.

Just then, bent intently over the readout of the tracking plot, Sakura had one of those stunning double-vision moments where reality and memory merged in one blinding pulse. She'd had a vision of this instant, of herself in the Mokona's shuttle, consumed with feverish urgency over just this tracking plot. Tracking what, she'd never been able to figure out. _The most precious thing in the universe._

What good did it do her _now_, to understand with such blinding clarity of hindsight? Why couldn't her visions have shown her something _useful,_ warned them of this deep-space ambush or warned her that Syaoran would be in danger? Why had she been too _stupid _to put it all together until it was too late, until nothing she or anyone else could have done would change anything?

Why, with all her special vision, couldn't she know whether Syaoran would live?

She remembered the vision of the forest, the strange Earth-like planetary surface that had so worried her before they'd disembarked for Europa. She could see it in her mind now, with crystal-clear precision: the way the moon hung low and strange in the twilight sky, the tree-covered slope, the path under the brush, the footing made precarious by twisted roots and the growing darkness. Yuui-san had been there, she was sure of it, because in the vision he was helping her across an unsteady patch of ground. And she was sure that the Captain had been there as well, a tall dark figure looming further along down the path. His clothes had been strange - he wore a dark cape and a strange-looking helmet, and his face was hidden from sight - but she would know those broad shoulders anywhere.

But try as she might, she couldn't remember seeing Syaoran anywhere in the picture. Not by her side, nor behind her, nor further along on the path, not anywhere. She'd thought nothing of the absence at the time she'd had the vision, but now it terrified her for what that lack might imply.

Sakura tried to rein in her burgeoning panic. Just because Syaoran hadn't been in _that_ vision at _that_ moment didn't mean anything. Right? She struggled to bring up memories of other visions, other glimpses of the future, but try as she might she could not remember whether Syaoran had been present in any of them. It was always seeing the missing things that was the hardest, the things that should have been there and weren't. She _thought _he had been, at least in some, but was that a real memory or just her own brain filling in the things she expected to see?

These types of thoughts weren't doing her _or _Syaoran any good. Sakura sniffed deeply, wishing she could wipe her face on her sleeve, and straightened her back in the pilot's chair.

One of the first things Yuui had taught her about her own powers was that no matter what she saw in the future, it _could_ be changed, if she took the right actions. The future wasn't set, wasn't certain; she could control her own destiny, and she _would. _Maybe she should have done things differently before this moment arrived, but it wasn't too late yet - not while they still had a chance to save him.

They were coming up on the rendezvous point. Sakura bit her lip while the numbers counted down on the screen, and - there! - made the final deceleration. They were now floating almost still in space with relation to Syaoran, a relative velocity of only a scant few kilometers per hour more than his speed. In time they would overtake and pass him by again, but until that time -

A discordant alarm sounded, the one indicating a substantial mass had been detected at a relatively short distance away from the shuttle's hull. Even as Sakura watched, .5 kilometers of distance dropped to .45 km, and Saura called to Yuui over the channel.

"This is as close as we can get, Yuui-san," she said, able to keep all but the faintest tremor out of her tone. "Start now."

Yuui's voice came back cool and measured over the line. "Cycling the airlock now."

The control light twinkled on Sakura's panel, indicating that the air was being evacuated from the lock - then the outer door opened and Yuui was away. He would have to cross over four hundred meters of empty space to recover Syaoran, then return to the ship before it passed out of their envelope. It was all up to Yuui now. There was nothing more Sakura could do.

But there _was_ one thing she could do, one thing only _she _could do. Biting her lip harder, Sakura leaned down towards the receiver. "Syaoran-kun," she said softly. "I don't know if you can hear me, but -"

They might be able to save him, or they might not. Even if they could get him back and return to the Mokona safely, Sakura wasn't a fool: she knew they might still die in a ship missile battle, or be captured by the Feds and separated for ever. Whatever happened, she didn't want it to be without Syaoran knowing the truth.

"I care about you so much, Syaoran-kun," she said softly, her heart breaking with the words. "You're the kindest, cleverest, funniest person I know. You always work so hard, you do so much for everyone, and most of all for me. I wouldn't be here without you, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere without you, either. I wanted you to know that I - I love you, Syaoran," she said, and swallowed down against a choking pain that threatened to close off her voice and her air. "And - and I think that maybe you love me too."

On the other end of the radio, Syaoran's gasping breaths evened out into something slower, but he didn't respond. Had her words reached him, calmed him, or had he finally passed out?

"Relax, Syaoran-kun," Yuui's voice came across the radio. His tone was soothing, almost hypnotic. "I'm coming to get you. I'm almost there. Don't move around too much, don't struggle. There we go." On her plot, the flashing beacons of the two Mokona-based suits blurred and then overlapped. "Got him. We're coming back now."

"I'm keeping the door open for you," Sakura responded. A sudden flurry of movement from the other plot - the wider one, showing all the ship's signatures in local Europan space - drew Sakura's attention and alarm. She flinched as she saw one sleek ship detach from its maneuvering orbit around the Mokona, tilting down from the plane of the ecliptic onto what could only be meant as an interception course for the little shuttle.

Unfortunately for the would-be sneaky ship, its path carried it right across the Mokona's missile envelope. The familiar freighter rolled and twisted, bright points of light streaked and swerved out from it, and the sleek ship convulsed in a corona of blue-white light as the missiles nailed it center-of-mass. It didn't - quite - break in half, but debris streaked out on all trajectories while the remaining ship reeled sideways and staggered away, crabwalking out of the firefight.

The shuttle, tapped into Mokona's sensor network, scanned the trajectory of each piece of debris and mapped its path - nothing that would be a danger to any of them, thank goodness. But who could say the next one wouldn't be? If enough of the maneuvering ships made a rush on the Mokona at once, Captain Kurogane would no longer have the attention nor the ammunition to spare to cover them.

"We're almost there," Yuui announced abruptly over her comm, and Sakura sat rigidly in the pilot's chair, her hands poised above the keyboard, sweat sliding cold down her spine. She watched like a hawk the indicator on the display that showed the shuttle's exterior airlock door. As soon as it cycled shut, Sakura stabbed the key that would lay in their course back to the home ship.

"Mokona, take us out of here!" Sakura cried, wheeling around in the station chair. "Maximum acceleration!"

"Okay, Sakura-chan!" the AI's voice chirped brightly, and Sakura registered the strangeness in the computer's reply but had no attention to spare for it. All of her mind was focused instead on the hasty trip from the shuttle's cockpit down to the airlock, the run-climb-slither-crawl between the cramped bulkheads down to the imposing metal door.

By the time she got there the lock had just finished repressurizing, and the orange blinking light flicked over to steady green as she waited with impatient breath. The buzzer sounded, the heavy door hissed with releasing pressure seals and rolled aside, and Yuui hovered in the airlock with Syaoran's familiar suited form in his arms.

"Syaoran!" Sakura cried, darting forward to seize his arm and pull him backwards out of the lock. Yuui followed, helping her to straighten Syaoran out of his curl and press him gently back against the flat bulkhead, but Sakura had no attention to spare for her teacher right now. "Syaoran!"

Her gloved hands scrabbled with the catch to Syaoran's helmet; it was foolishness, she knew, to compromise the airtight seal on Syaoran's suit when they were still in the danger zone. But she couldn't help it, she had to see him, she _had _to prove to herself that he was all right. She wouldn't breathe again until she knew he was breathing too.

She forced back the visor of Syaoran's helmet, and a glad sob escaped her throat as Syaoran's slack face was revealed. His eyes were closed, his skin an ashy hue - but he was breathing, his lips moving slightly, his eyelids fluttering. "You're alive," Sakura said, and the tears she'd forced back all this terrible hour came pouring freely now.

To hell with it. Sakura knocked back her own visor, and dashed her tears on her sleeve; several of them escaped her helmet, and dripped on Syaoran's face below her.

His eyes fluttered barely open. "Sakura," he whispered, his voice strained and hoarse. He reached out one clumsy, feeble hand towards her, and Sakura immediately captured his hand with both of her own.

"Don't strain yourself," she said, her voice shaking. "You're going to be all right."

Stubbornly, he tugged her hand upwards, and Sakura in her confusion let him. With their joined hands near the open faceplate of his helmet, Syaoran leaned forward a few centimeters and pressed his lips against the back of her hand. "Always," he gasped out, "always."

Sakura let out a long, shaking breath, feeling her entire body trembling with relief. Without letting go of Syaoran's hand she straightened, and clicked open the ship's channel in her helmet. "Captain," she said, her voice full of weary exaltation, "we're coming home."

* * *

><p>Another would-be bounty hunter's ship disintegrated, a sphere of bright fire blooming against the dark backdrop of space as her engines blew. It shouldn't have happened - he'd only scored a glancing blow, the ship's own safety measures should have shut the fusion bottle down before it had a chance to blow, but what could you expect from scraprunners like these? He'd probably disabled his own safety measures long ago to save a few yebs on maintenance, and his sampan hadn't even been armored. He'd been a fool to involve himself in this firefight, a suicidal fool, but the expanding cloud of radioactive dust made a wonderful object lesson for any other idiot who chose to follow in his wake. Kurogane opened his communicators to a wide-band broadcast, audible to anyone with an open receiver in local space.<p>

"Don't cross me, you motherfucking slag-scrappers, don't you cross me if you value your lives!" he snarled into the receiver, sending out the searing transmission like another wave of missiles. "Do you know who I am? I'm the Black Dragon of Suwa. I'm the last survivor of the first and greatest stationer clan, and I killed thirty-nine men with my own hands who betrayed my family to die!"

The next few ships turning towards them seemed to hesitate, making no immediate moves towards either the Mokona or the shuttle. They knew his name, then, or at least his legend - not one he usually cared to trade on, but right now he had not enough missiles and too many heads to break. He was vulnerable, they were _all _vulnerable, and every second spent eating up time on the airwaves was time not spent trying to swat enemy fire aimed at Sakura's shuttle out of the sky.

He was a sitting duck up here. Without Syaoran piloting, the two of them working in sync, he couldn't just rely on Mokona dodging enemy attacks; he had to deflect it all with his guns, and a single missed missile could mean the end of everything. It was a fucking stupid move on Kanoe's part to risk the life of the man she was supposed to be retrieving. The bridge was sealed off, but the torus was vulnerable, and while the blond idiot had gone out in the shuttle Kurogane knew the man had left his twin in their cabin. Did Kanoe know, somehow, that Fai was on the ship and not the shuttle? And if so, how?

"With your own hands, you say?" an unwelcome voice cut in, cold and hard as a blade. Kanoe's face flickered back up on Kurogane's viewscreen, without his acknowledging her broadcast - she was using the emergency overrides again, _damn _her. "That would be quite a boast, if most of those thirty-nine men and women were not unarmed and defenseless office clerks and technicians, whom you arbitrarily decided to blame for the Suwa habitat accident."

"It was no accident," he snarled back into the comm, knowing as he did that every pilot in Europa space was listening in. "It was never an accident. Those 'unarmed' technicians were the ones to upload the virus into our envirosys network to bring down the safety locks, and those 'clerks' flushed ten pounds of scrap metal into countersynch orbit with our station! It was sabotage, from start to finish it was murder, and I can't even stomach how many bribes it must have taken for that gutless wonder of an investigator to declare that massacre any kind of 'accident'!"

Damn the bitch anyway for turning his personal tragedy into a sideshow! But every minute they kept feuding on the airwaves was another minute she wasn't bringing in her overmuscled warship against him, and every moment they kept the circling vultures hesitating, the rescue party came that one moment closer to success. "It was clear enough that no one else was going to give me justice, so I took it for myself, I got my own vengeance for my parents and my home and my people, and fuck the cowardly hypocrites of the U.N. if they thought they could stop me!"

"Captain," Mokona said in his ear, "Another enemy ship is approaching ten degrees from port-side."

The new enemy had a sleek, hammer-headed design, with a flared bow that spoke of well-stocked ammunition caches and heavy armor plating along all the sides. This was no mere scuttler, this was obviously a ship that had seen battle - no doubt one of the more violent 'smugglers' that plagued the Jovian space trade. They flocked around here, preying on the legitimate fuel and supplies freighters, and all they had to do to blend in with Europa's vessels were slap a transponder on when they docked here.

"And how did your little vigilantism spree work out for you, hmm?" Kanoe's voice was saccharine-sweet, a false cordiality that dripped with poison. "Did you end up baron of your own pirate fleet out in the reaches of space? No, you went from being the heir to a multinational cartel to a common criminal, sentences to two consecutive lifetimes in a maximum security Lunar prison."

Kurogane ignored her as he queued up several missile protocols, designating the hammerheaded ship as Priority One but keeping an eye out for other opportunistic sharks, as well. Kanoe, damn her eyes, just kept on talking. "But you didn't even serve that sentence, now did you? Even that might give you some kind of worth, some kind of status. Instead you slithered out.

"I don't know how you bribed the techs to get on your side, or maybe they just felt sorry for you, a stupid skinny kid stuck in with the rest of the hard-timers without the faintest idea what you'd let yourself in for. They slapped you into cryo almost as soon as you hit the cells, didn't they? You never served a full year of your sentence. And spat you out seventy years later, a man lost out of time, a helpless chickadee who barely even knows how to work the servos on a modern space station, let alone meddle in the affairs of the Eurasian Federation Ministry of Space."

Despite himself Kurogane's hands faltered at the keyboard as a spasm of pain gripped him, remembering that day, that awful, awful day when he'd woken up out of cryo-sleep; that nauseating terror of at first not understanding where he was, _when_ he was, what had happened. And then, as the cryo-tech had broken the news to him - not unkindly, but somehow her pity had made it all the _worse - _understanding came at last, and was worse than anything that had come before.

"Ooh," Yuui's impressed murmur came back weakly to him over their ship's communicators "No _wonder _Captain Finicky always seemed so old-fashioned about everything..."

Kurogane spared a moment of seething anger at Kanoe, at the circling vultures, at the whole damn universe for knowing that Yuui, that Syaoran, that _Sakura-chan_ were all hearing this. But his attention was all on the enemy ship, had to be. This ship was built of tougher stuff, its plating harder to penetrate; pirate vessels were built to take fire from the front. This one was lit up on Mokona's screen with the special hue that indicated it carried nuclear weapons on board, and Kurogane ground his teeth so hard he heard it, his every speck of attention focused on scrolling numbers and data displays, waiting - waiting for his opening - _there!_

As the ship smoothly slid sideways it overbalanced a little, and Kurogane wasted no time in launching another _hama ryu-oujin _attack right at it; the missiles screamed up underneath its less armoured underbelly and another rose of fire bloomed, all too briefly. For a second the pirate ship did nothing, and Kurogane quickly began calling up the next sequence of attacks; and then it simply banked hard to its port side and fled.

Kurogane said nothing, every fibre of his being suddenly ablaze with hatred; for her, for her smug face, for the flag in front of which she posed. Kanoe seemed to have noticed. Her lips curved upward, the smile broadening. "You've knocked out all comers, I see," she continued. "Quite a fierce fighter, for such a pitifully small boat. But now you're done. The _Mihara _isn't one of those pitiful junkyard tugboats, and you've used up most of your magazine. You're powerless, Captain, toothless and dead in the water."

"Captain!" The voice coming over the line this time the voice was Sakura's, breathless and taut. "We're coming home."

Kurogane exhaled, closing his eyes for just a moment lifted his eyes from the combat display, glancing over at the tracking plot open on Syaoran's monitor. The shuttle was beginning to accelerate, slowly, and her projected course put her close enough to the ship for Mokona's auto-pilot to take over and bring it in. "The kid okay?" Kurogane asked tersely, and there was a pause before an entirely different person replied, "Yes, Captain Firefight. He's fine. Shocked, I think. Sakura has him."

So that made all three of them safe, kids and spoonbender. Kurogane took a moment to let the relief wash through him, breathing out slowly, and then fired a warning shot at another ship attempting to creep up on Mokona's underbelly. Fine. "Get back here as soon as you can," Kurogane said, swinging his display to the incoming threat port-side. "We're gonna try slipping along the surface and bolting around Jupiter. Ship that big can't accelerate quickly, we've got to -"

"Impossible," said a soft voice behind Kurogane, and he turned sharply in his chair, nearly whacking the attack-execute button on his console as he did. The twin was standing just inside the hatch, watching him intently. His thin, sallow face wore no expression whatsoever. "Ship that big can accelerate quick as it likes. She's jump-ready, you see."

"There's nowhere you can run - haven't you figured that out yet?" Kanoe taunted him. "Wherever you go, we can follow. Wherever you try to hide, we'll find you. Whoever shelters you, we'll root them out and burn them."

"Do you ever get tired of the sound of your own voice?" Kurogane said sharply. "Give it a rest. We're not going to surrender. You'll have to kill us to get what you're after -"

"Will I? I wonder what those children on board your vessel think of that - that you'd consign them to death so willingly," Kanoe said coldly. "Go on, Captain Kurogane, or should I call you Suwa no Youou? Threaten us with vengeance and murder until the stars go cold. Last orphan of a dead sky-clan, helpless and alone. Anyone who might have sided with you is fifty years dead. You and I both know there's no victory for you here, no victory and no escape. You have only two choices: surrender those psychics, or let the lot of you be blown out of the sky, and die knowing as you do that you chose their deaths."

Kurogane could say nothing to that; there was nothing _to_say. Instead, he just cut the comm - he couldn't override the emergency broadcast, but he could at least cut the sound, plunging the Mokona's cockpit into blessed silence even if he couldn't rid himself of her hateful image.

Fai made a small noise, although what it meant Kurogane couldn't say. He glanced sideward sharply at the man, who was out of the frame for the transmission, and gestured angrily at Syaoran's chair. "What the hell are you doing up here?" he growled. "Sit down and don't touch anything."

Fai tilted his head to one side quizzically, but sat. Thank fuck for small mercies. Figured the dumb blond had forgotten to lock his brother in. Now he had a crazy man on his bridge in the middle of a firefight, one who was still staring at him with that creepy, oddly focused cast to his bright blue eyes. The Mokona bleeped; another ship, circling around to starboard, looked like they were going after the returning shuttle - Kurogane snarled indignantly and leapt back to the display. His targeting lit up the ship like a beacon, and it prudently veered off.

For a moment Kurogane contemplated sending his attacks at its retreating back anyway, and then he growled and let it go. He'd used up enough missiles, and there would be more fighting ahead, he was sure of it... except when he glanced back at the starmap display, he couldn't see any living ship. Shrapnel filled the field of combat, and some small shuttles were operating, travelling in the erratic manner that indicated deep-space rescue, no doubt of people he'd blown out of the air. His own shuttle was decelerating slowly as she approached his ship.

"Fierce fighter," said that voice quietly, and Kurogane pulled himself slowly out of his battle-haze to see Fai had moved closer. He was standing right behind Syaoran's chair, his head crooked upwards and his eyes on a patch of ceiling. "Is there nobody stronger?"

"Captain, we're almost there," Yuui said tersely over the intercom. "I'm bringing Sakura and Syaoran up to the bridge."

Kurogane flipped the switch to reply, keeping his gaze fixed on Fai. "You do that," he said. The bridge would be the second safest space for the kids, now that Earth woman had run out of idiots to sling at them. The engine room would have been better, but Kurogane guessed the kids would want to know what was going on, and he trusted them to keep out of the way. This stranger, though... "Got something in here already that belongs to you."

Fai's face lit up and he beamed at Kurogane, a sunshine smile quite wide and _weird_. "Yes! Yuui's, that's right."

" _Fai_?" Yuui sounded incredulous. "What - how did you - ?"

Kurogane opened his mouth to order Fai off his bridge - and then his combat screen suddenly went haywire.

Fireworks bounced and ricocheted off its edges; Mokona's avatar appeared in the middle of it, doing a strange dance with her paws above her head, rabbit eyes swaying back and forth. Numbers scrolled rapidly across the screen, and under the obscuring layer of the fireworks Kurogane could see an program installation bar, filling and refilling so fast he couldn't help but hold his breath. He leaned back from the console, glancing quickly around his bridge. " _Virus_- sneaky duplicitous bitch -"

The other computer screens were mirroring the display. Music was swelling in the speakers, some outrageously twee pop song about how a young man wanted his baby to go on a space walk with him, and Mokona's avatar danced on every screen... except the one in front of the crazy twin. There was nothing there at all. Fai must have caught Kurogane's eyes on him, because he turned from his intent stare-down with his blackened screen, and smiled at him peacefully. "I couldn't do it all at once," he said. "I had to come back and finish it here. She'll be online again soon."

Kurogane's eyes flicked in horror from the black computer screen to Fai's oblivious smile. "What did you do?" he demanded; " _What did you do to my ship?_"

Fai got up, stretching; his spine popped. Syaoran's computer screen, the dead one, was now showing an elegant image of a butterfly in profile; it flapped its wings a few times and then took off in an upward spiral while the Ichihara Industries loading screen for its GUI appeared. "Make a Wish," read the words under the butterfly, followed by the Ichihara logo.

"We're docked," Yuui's voice suddenly burst out of the speakers. "Captain, what's going on with the monitors? We're on our way up."

Fai wandered over to Kurogane's chair, folding his arms over the back of it and leaning down to fit into the transmission's shot. Kurogane couldn't stop staring at him. He'd _never_heard of a ship's computer doing anything like this, and he had no idea what to do.

"What's the plan, Fai-chama?" Mokona said brightly. "It's awful gloomy in here, don't you think? Oh, maybe we should play the 'Dun dun dun _dun_' song! What do you think, Captain Kurogane?"

"What," Kurogane said, staring, "Did you do to my ship?"

"I fixed her," Fai said. He patted Kurogane on the head - _patted Kurogane on the head_ , like Kurogane was a kind of fucking _dog_ , and Fai wasn't the moron who had just _wrecked his ship AI_ . "_You _broke her. That wasn't a very smart thing to do, Captain... um..."

"Kurogane," offered Mokona. "The grumpy Captain's name is Kurogane. I wrote it down in the logs once. His favourite colour is "Why are you asking me that?" and his favourite song, with the most plays on his personal computer library, is 'Show me your sword' by the Martian Barefoot Quartet -"

…. Kurogane didn't even know what he was doing, but before he could stop himself or come to his senses, he'd punched the touchscreen of his combat station. It didn't damage the glass - it was designed to withstand harder impacts - but it sent Mokona's avatar bowling away as though he'd physically struck her, wailing as she went. "Captain _Grumpy_ is _grumpy_, waaaaaaaah~!"

"Put it back," he growled at Fai, and Fai shook his head calmly.

"I won't," he said serenely, "She's needed this way. I can't save us without her."

Kurogane glanced sharply at the transmission with Kanoe - only to see the screen had gone black. "I cut her off," Mokona said slyly. "She seemed _mean_, and I didn't like her technicians. So I just rewrote my comm frequencies."

Kurogane stared speechlessly at the screen, feeling as though the world was slipping away from them. Ahead of them the Mihara gleamed, but it wasn't moving. "They're going to try to rehack my communications again before they do anything," Mokona offered. "We've got ten minutes before I have to change again. Sakura-chan and Syaoran-kun are almost here with Yuui-kun, Fai!"

Fai slid quietly into the pilot's chair. "China paid for the trip, you know, but the colonists would have gone anyway. It was their dream, of a life amidst the _death_."

Kurogane bent over his console, hammering at buttons; but nothing seemed to be working. The computer appeared to have locked him out. His combat screen simply displayed the message, "We apologize for any inconvenience caused by saving your life."

"Fai!" the bridge hatch burst open and Yuui climbed up a second later, having obviously used his gift to force the heavy door open; he staggered in, tripping a bit in his brand new vac suit. Kurogane pushed himself to his feet, irritably crossing the room to grab the man by the wrist and tugging him inside.

"What has he done?" he growled. "The ship's gone all - crazy!"

"Her personality core has been integrated," Yuui said, pale. "She talked to us the whole shuttle-ride back. We couldn't patch through to the bridge, she said that Earth ship was interfering. Fai -"

"I thought I told you to lock him in his room!"

"I _did_! Well, I moved the couch unit in front of the door - there's no way he should have been able to budge it -"

"He moved it back and I opened the door for him," Mokona said helpfully. Without looking back at them, Fai raised a hand in acknowledgement. "He began fixing me a while ago, see! But it was a two-stage process and he needed to be in here to finish it."

Yuui stared at her. "But... how did he move...? When did he fix... Wait. In the med bay, after he overdosed. You told me he was going to be alright."

"Yes," Mokona said, wistfully. "My parametres were incomplete. I was - half there. Aware, or beginning to be, but I wasn't all the way fixed, then. I am now. I'll help us get away from the big mean Fed ship. Yuuko made me for that reason, you see."

Now it was Yuui's turn to silently mouth _what_? as Syaoran appeared at the hatch; still pale, looking a little shaken, but determined. Sakura followed close behind; they were holding hands, very tightly, their fingers threaded together.

Fai breathed out slowly and straightened in his chair, and when he spoke, his voice was cool and aloof - like the way he had relayed the telepath's broadcast messages to Kurogane, back down on Karen's habitat. "Mokona, section Theta-One-Alpha, _Shinsengumi _Sector. Destination, Koryo Colony. Prepare."

"Preparing," Mokona sing-songed back. "MEKYO! Preparations complete!"

"Chances of pursuit?"

"Slim," said Mokona. "Only one with the power to travel there, on standby rotation. They will need to retrieve him and fit him up."

"What is he doing?" Syaoran wondered beside Kurogane, stepping uncertainly towards the pilot's chair - his chair. Yuui shoved past him, both hands reaching out to Fai's shoulders.

"Fai - tell me what's going on, I can't help you if I don't understand. Please, I - _what happened to your eyes?_"

Yuui jumped away, suddenly pale and with both hands clasped over his mouth; before Kurogane could begin to move forward Fai was turning his head to look at his twin, and in profile Kurogane could easily see what had made Yuui startle so.

Fai's eyes were burning up, twin pools of golden fire.

Yuui lowered his hands, his face waxy and pale. "What did they _do_?" he whispered, and Fai tilted his head and smiled, sadly.

"I see what she sees. She sees what I see, she sees where to go, and we go together," he said. "Time to go. Bend time and space. Jump, Mokona, jump, jump jump _jump _-"

And everything suddenly went black.

* * *

><p>It took some time for the darkness to fade. When it did, Kurogane found himself sprawled across his gunner's chair, neck crooked at an uncomfortable angle. Fai was slumped over the pilot's dash, still as stone; Yuui was crumpled on the floor next to him, pale and unconscious but breathing. He'd smacked his head off something on the way down; blood was leaking from beneath his hairline. Syaoran and Sakura had fallen over in the middle of the room, and as Kurogane watched they began to climb awkwardly to their feet, legs wobbling like they'd been in his booze stash again; they had to support each other upright. They were both pale, too.<p>

Woodenly, Kurogane stood up, and blinked away the dizziness and the wave of vertigo that followed. The deck seemed slanting, somehow, and it was harder than he'd thought it would be to cross over to the two unmoving blonds, but once he did he checked Fai's pulse on a routine instinct - it was there, strong and steady - and then Yuui's. Yuui eyelids flickered open when Kurogane touched him, but his blue eyes were hazy.

"Wow," he said, voice soft and distant, "I feel like I just attended six New Year's parties at once."

"What happened?" Syaoran asked, groggily.

"We jumped," said Mokona. Her avatar appeared on the central console; her voice was excited and gleeful. "We're out of Earth's hands now. Safe."

"Safe?" Syaoran said. He was shaken from his near-death experience out-ship, but recovering his sharp acumen quickly. "How can anywhere be safe? I - I don't understand."

In response, Mokona's display windows flickered to life, one by one, showing the panorama of space around them.

Empty space. Undisturbed space. No ships, no docks, no debris as far as the eye could see in any direction. There was no sign of the Mihara, nor of any of the pursuing would-be bounty hunters. It was a glimpse of what the space above a planet must have looked like once upon a time, before mankind came to build in this new playground and impress upon it his footprint. The sodium glow of the gas giant was gone from overhead; the sterile white of Europa gone from below their feet. Pristine blackness, gemmed with shimmering stars, stretched out endlessly above them.

Strange stars, in strange patterns and constellations completely unfamiliar.

Millions of kilometers below them turned the great luminescent globe of a planet. Blue-green oceans stretched and surged across half its surface area; not Mars. Frosty white polar caps crept from each pole down towards the equator, greater than had been seen on Earth for many an eon. No moon crested the empyreum, the planet's high atmosphere hushed and undisturbed.

It seemed almost profane to speak, to disturb the silence with more than a breath, but at last they tore themselves away from the unfamiliar sky to take in the truth of each other, borne here whole and alive and indisputably real.

"Where are we?" Sakura asked softly.

* * *

><p><strong>-end part 3 - Europa -<strong>

**-end _Not Quite Paradise.-_**

Author's Notes: _This is the end of Not Quite Paradise, but not the end of the Mokona's adventures, by far! Watch Reikah's author page for the next installment in this series, picking up where our travelers left off on Koryo.__  
><em>


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